When a company that sells AI starts quoting FDR, read the fine print. OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wants the 2028 presidential election to be a defining moment for AI, and he is already telling politicians what to promise.
In a new essay, as TechCrunch reported, Lehane compares AI’s economic impact to the New Deal. He says Americans feel the same anxiety about losing control of their economic futures, and he urges a “compelling third path” where people share in AI’s benefits. He lists five priorities, from worker protections and education to AI safety and data center development.
The timing is deliberate. Democrats just flipped Congress on voter anger over the cost of living, and data center opposition turned bipartisan in several races. Affordability will likely dominate 2028 too, and AI touches all of it: electricity bills, job losses, and gains flowing to a few rich companies. Lehane is probably right that AI becomes a bigger campaign issue.
But the details lean toward OpenAI’s interests. Kate Brennan of the AI Now Institute told TechCrunch the essay is a notable shift from last year’s agenda of faster development, fewer regulatory barriers, and more infrastructure. Yet many proposals still encourage wider adoption and the infrastructure OpenAI needs. The original New Deal constrained corporate power. This version offers incentives for learning AI skills, easier capital for entrepreneurs, and new takes on employee ownership. None of that binds companies to share wealth or pay for displacing workers. Brennan called the New Deal framing “ahistorical at best and harmful at worst.”
The data center section follows the same pattern. Lehane nods at local concerns, stresses construction jobs and tax revenue, then compares supporting a moratorium to the 2002 Iraq war vote, arguing it would cost the US its lead over China. On schools, he warns that keeping AI out of classrooms widens inequality, but that assumes AI improves learning, which is still unproven.
His safety proposals include enforceable standards, independent evaluations, public oversight, and a kill switch. That sounds good. Still, OpenAI opposed California’s SB 1047 in 2024, which would have required catastrophic risk evaluations and shutdown capabilities. It also pushed to limit state regulation last year. The company has since backed several state safety laws and said it would accept independent evaluators embedded inside it. Recent studies also show OpenAI and other labs haven’t published comprehensive plans for a model escaping human control.
Does this matter? Yes, as a signal. OpenAI knows the political mood has turned, and it wants to write the response before anyone else does. Anthropic and Google will face the same pressure. Brennan suggests the real tests would be a revised corporate tax rate, incentives to hire humans over automating, and limits on market concentration. Lehane offers none of those. OpenAI didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
