I got a call the other evening from the (opens in new tab)Connie Chan for Congress (opens in new tab) campaign. The volunteer wanted to know if they could count on my vote.
I don’t fault Chan’s campaign for not having matched my name with the person who wrote in May that there was little in the background of Chan, the District 1 supervisor, “to suggest a passion for national policy” or that state Sen. Scott Wiener, Chan’s opponent in the race to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi, “has earned the right to represent us in the House.”
Admirably on script, Chan’s campaign aide told me that Connie is for working people, while Scott is a “corporate Democrat.” I couldn’t help but blurt out: “I’m a corporate Democrat!” With that, we amicably thanked each other and said goodbye.
It is amusing that Chan is positioning Wiener as a toady of business interests, particularly Big Tech. The entire country is freaking out (opens in new tab)over artificial intelligence right now. Trumpists, sane Republicans, establishment Democrats, and AI CEOs are among the chief freaker-outers. Wiener, it’s worth recalling, was ahead of all of them on this critical issue.
Wiener started raising the alarm about AI’s horrific potential three years ago. When he passed one of the first AI bills (opens in new tab) in the country in 2024, everyone who mattered, including tech leaders, Gov. Gavin Newsom, then-Mayor London Breed, and, yes, Pelosi, opposed him. Now it’s obvious that Wiener was right — right to be prudently concerned about AI, and right to craft sensible, modestly restrictive legislation to mitigate the risks. That’s because he is the kind of serious, forward-thinking, courageous legislator San Francisco needs in Washington. Supportive of business when it matches his political agenda, he nevertheless is no shill for Big Tech.
And yet, Wiener very well could lose this race if the people who are naturally aligned with him don’t wake up to the fact that he’s in a dogfight with a savvy Chan and the highly motivated Pelosi, who is all but running Chan’s race.
“I was being called every name in the book,” Wiener told me last week in an interview at a downtown coffee shop. “Doomer, decel. They said I was perpetuating science fiction and that these risks were not real.” (“Decel” — I looked it up — is short for “decelerationist,” someone who wants to slow the growth of AI, which happens to be what many AI bigwigs are now advocating.) “I am not anti-AI,” said Wiener. “I want it to do good things for humanity. I just don’t want it to harm humanity.”
True to form, Wiener went about his legislative work methodically, having been prodded by various concerned technologists and policy wonks. He offered a placeholder bill in the state senate in 2023 that served as a policy memo for further discussion. The bill he passed through both houses of the Legislature the following year focused mainly on the biggest AI companies and would have required pre-launch safety standards, “kill-switch” technology, whistleblower protections, and various safety protocols — all things Congress and the Trump administration are kicking around but have not acted on.
Wiener told me he was most concerned with catastrophic risk and the possibility that AI would perpetrate “all sorts of major crimes and terrorist activity that, if engaged in by a human, would put that person in prison forever.” These include calamities like shutting down the power grid, crippling the banking system, and creating and deploying chemical and biological weapons.
After his bill passed, the tech industry went ballistic against it and him. The loudest voice was the MAGA-supporting venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which treats AI regulation the same way the NRA approaches gun control and San Francisco’s public-sector unions view layoffs: None of it is welcome. Pelosi vocally opposed the legislation, widely interpreted as a move to undercut Wiener as he mounted a stealthy campaign to run for her seat. Newsom, persuaded that regulation would drive AI companies out of California, vetoed Wiener’s bill. Nothing if not dogged, Wiener came back last year with a stripped-down bill — no kill switches, for example — that Newsom signed. (Last week the governor broached calling a special legislative session to amp up the state’s AI regulatory game.)
Given Wiener’s position ahead of the curve on AI policy, his creation of a chatbot to mock Chan this year was particularly stupid. “It was a mistake,” he said of the shitstorm the stunt unleashed. “We shouldn’t have done it.” As for Chan’s recent claims that he is in bed with Big Tech — Anthropic, the most safety-conscious of the AI giants, has contributed to an outside group backing him — the often robotic politician’s temper flares. “It’s a lie,” he said, adding: “She never lifted a finger to do any of this work.”
The whole subject of Wiener’s friendliness with business is one that begs for only-in-San- Francisco contextualization. He proudly calls himself a progressive, showing off a slide with his 97% rating from the California Labor Federation and 16% rating from the California Chamber of Commerce. Still, as a legislative champion of high-density housing development, he is a hero to real estate developers and other YIMBYs. And in the sense that he is pro-transit and more supportive of cops than some of his political brethren, Wiener rightly is considered a San Francisco moderate.
“There’s only one person running for Congress who is going to do a goddam thing to get us more federal funding for transit in San Francisco,” said a fiery Stephen Sherrill, the most business-friendly member of the Board of Supervisors, last week at a breakfast gathering of moderate-aligned supervisor candidates. “He’s the one candidate in the race who opposed Prop. D” — the Overpaid CEO Tax that voters defeated in June — “and the Billionaire Tax” on the state ballot in November.
This is all true. And yet I’m increasingly hearing from mods who are so angry with Wiener about his AI bill or his Gaza flip-flop or his counterproductive Trump bashing (in contrast to Mayor Daniel Lurie’s masterful handling of the easily distractible president) that they’re considering sitting out the congressional race altogether.
Lurie, for reasons of his own, is also a problem for Wiener. In a rerun of Lurie’s silence last year over recalled Supervisor Joel Engardio, the mayor appears unlikely to back a candidate with whom he aligns on nearly every policy issue. Lurie prizes collegiality with Chan, who isn’t much of a legislative ally, such as when she pried concessions out of him for his signature rezoning plan last year, then voted against it anyway.
Moderates not voting for Wiener would do well to remember the Bernie Sanders supporters who were too upset with Hillary Clinton to vote for her in 2016, which led to cursing us with Trump the first time around. Simply failing to support Wiener could install Chan in Congress for a generation.
Wiener isn’t perfect. By national standards, he isn’t even that moderate. But as his AI prescience shows, he’s a thoughtful lawmaker with San Francisco’s best interests in mind.