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The Impact A weekly look at the intersection of AI, advocacy, and politics from the team at MFStrategies | www.MFStrategies.com |
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If you’re not catching opportunities, someone else is.
Today, we’re launching The Impact, a weekly newsletter built for professionals navigating the fast-moving, ever-changing world of AI in public and political life.
Each edition of The Impact will cut through the hype and noise to give you clear, actionable insights from a campaigner's perspective that you can use before your competitors even realize what’s changed.
For those unfamiliar, we’re MFStrategies: a team of battle-tested political professionals who’ve spent the last decade delivering wins where they matter most. Now, we’re bringing that same strategic edge to help leaders like yourself understand, adapt, and thrive in an AI-driven landscape.
Find out more about how we've smashed records and made history with clients: www.MFStrategies.com!
Now, to this week's toplines:
AI rules are shifting fast. Washington turned some chip bans into demanding 15% of sales to China. Spain still picked Huawei, hinting pressure alone won’t move allies. The better lever may be buying power and Policy‑as‑Code: clear, machine‑check rules others want to follow. At home, DOJ is a warning sign: hundreds of point tools, 12 license‑plate readers, nine transcription apps, and lots of manual handoffs. That wastes time just as AI agents speed up and the fight for chips, power, and minerals heats up. Meta even hired a political “bias” adviser...from the far-right.
Winners will build end‑to‑end workflows, prove security automatically, and lock in compute without ad‑hoc deals.
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AI / Political News of the Week
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Council on Foreign Relations
Takeaway
Despite bipartisan directives and rising spend on AI, federal adoption remains siloed and duplicative, with the DOJ as a case study: hundreds of tools, few department-wide, and narrow point solutions stitched across workflows. Fragmentation yields redundancy (e.g., 12 license-plate readers, nine transcription systems) and manual handoffs that slow investigations and introduce errors. The authors call for faster, more visible acquisition pathways and end-to-end workflow integration to capture AI’s promised gains.
Why it matters
Fragmented AI adoption across agencies blunts returns on taxpayer investment, hampers information sharing, and delays mission outcomes from law enforcement to national security. A cohesive, agile strategy, paired with continuous model updates and cross-bureau interoperability, would unlock efficiency, improve decision quality, and reduce duplicative spend. Public-sector leaders and vendors should align on enterprise architectures and procurement models that scale high-impact use cases rather than proliferating one-off tools.
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TIME
Takeaway
Ian Bremmer argues AI progress is accelerating toward “Nadella’s Law,” with capabilities doubling every six months and near‑term agentic systems poised to automate complex tasks. He forecasts major labor disruption across white‑ and blue‑collar jobs and a geopolitical scramble for AI inputs, chips, energy, and critical minerals, centered on U.S.–China rivalry. The U.S. retains advantages via its hyperscalers and innovation ecosystem, but he warns current policy choices toward universities, allies, and export regimes could erode that edge.
Why it matters
AI’s trajectory will reshape domestic politics, labor markets, and national security within the next two to three years, compressing timelines for policy and corporate strategy. Decisions on export controls, research funding, talent immigration, and alliances will determine who controls compute, data, and power, and who gets left behind. Leaders in government and campaigns need to prepare for sharper populist pressures as job displacement collides with geopolitical competition.
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War on the Rocks
Takeaway
Spain’s decision to award Huawei a €12.3 million contract for police wiretap storage, despite EU designations of Huawei as a high‑risk supplier, underscores the limits of pressure‑only strategies. The analysis argues the United States should wield its $774 billion procurement power to implement Policy‑as‑Code, automated, machine‑readable security standards across AI, cloud, and IoT, to create superior, trusted alternatives that allies adopt on technical merit. Timelines are already set: pilots by June 2026 and machine‑readable security labels by January 2027.
Why it matters
U.S. procurement rules are becoming a geopolitical instrument to set global tech norms at machine speed, not diplomat speed. Aligning buying power with automated security verification can lower compliance costs, broaden access for smaller innovators, and establish de facto standards that outcompete Chinese offerings without triggering new trade barriers. Vendors selling to government, and allies integrating U.S. tech, will need continuous, verifiable security baselines, shifting competition from lobbying to measurable resilience.
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The Fulcrum
Takeaway
A White House-brokered agreement will allow Nvidia and AMD to resume selling AI chips to China if they surrender 15% of revenue from those sales to the U.S. government. The piece argues this shifts export controls from a national security tool to a pay‑to‑export model and risks normalizing executive‑driven, transactional industrial policy. Former officials warn the deal could be “possibly illegal” and a “terrible precedent.”
Why it matters
Monetizing export permissions blurs the lines among national security, taxation, and industrial strategy, elevating ad hoc executive dealmaking over clear, legislated rules. Such an approach could spread to other sectors, politicize commerce, and signal to allies and rivals that access to U.S. technology can be negotiated for a fee. A coherent, transparent framework grounded in congressional oversight is crucial to counter China while protecting markets, innovation, and the rule of law.
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User Mag
Takeaway
User Mag reports that Meta has hired Robby Starbuck as an advisor to identify “ideological and political bias” in its AI products. The publication describes Starbuck as a right‑wing influencer known for online campaigns pressuring companies to roll back DEI policies. The appointment suggests Meta is formalizing external input on AI fairness amid heightened political scrutiny.
Why it matters
Who defines “bias” in AI will shape model behavior, safety choices, and speech boundaries for billions of users. Involving overtly political figures in advisory roles could intensify perceptions of capture and influence policy debates, elections, and regulatory oversight of AI fairness. Companies building general‑purpose AI face growing pressure to balance viewpoint diversity with civil‑rights compliance and global content rules.
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Information Age (ACS)
Takeaway
The U.S. government reversed its ban on Nvidia and AMD selling certain AI chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of sales, allowing Nvidia’s H20 exports to resume. The deal, secured after lobbying by CEO Jensen Huang, could restore billions in China revenue while drawing sharp criticism and legal questions about national‑security tradeoffs and constitutional limits on taxing exports.
Why it matters
US export‑control credibility and AI supply chains are at stake as Washington shifts toward preserving a U.S. “tech stack” footprint in China rather than blanket restrictions. A revenue‑sharing carve‑out could normalize pay‑for‑policy arrangements, complicate compliance for multinationals, and spur China’s push for sovereign AI chips.
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Worth thinking about
“America’s competitive advantage lies in creating security standards that others choose to adopt voluntarily.” -Daria Bahrami
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