This week on The Impact, Addie and Hal trace a quiet but seismic shift: power moving from elected leaders to the systems they’ve built. From New York courtrooms to classrooms to campaign inboxes, AI is no longer a side project—it’s infrastructure. But when the President signals that advanced tech will be used to police speech, the stakes hit constitutional level. Addie unpacks what that means for free expression and for anyone running a campaign or advocacy shop, while Hal presses on the practical: how do you move fast without surrendering control?

They dig into New York’s new AI court rules, and the federal stall that’s leaving states and vendors to set the standards. The question running beneath it all: when machines start enforcing the boundaries of public speech, who decides where those lines go?

California just redrew the map for artificial intelligence—with a new law forcing big AI companies to publish safety plans, report incidents, and prepare for real oversight. Hal and Addie break down what the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act means, why OpenAI’s surprising cooperation matters, and how it’s already rippling through Washington. From Congress’s bid to centralize AI control under the Department of Energy to Meta’s new super PAC aimed at shaping state laws—and even the White House’s push to fund AI-driven cancer research—this episode connects the dots between technology, regulation, and power. The rules are finally arriving. Now comes the test of who writes them.

This week on The Impact, Hal and Addie unpack California’s new AI law that forces big developers to publish safety frameworks, report failures, and protect whistleblowers—rules that could ripple nationwide. They dig into CMS’s plan to pilot AI in Medicare prior authorizations across six states, raising questions about what “meaningful human review” really means. They cover Meta’s launch of a super PAC to influence the more than 1,100 state AI bills moving this year, and the federal government’s approval of Meta’s open-source Llama model for agency use. The thread through it all: AI adoption in government is speeding up, but the guardrails—and the political battles over them—are being built in real time.