Steve Hilton Slams Ai Leaders In Their Home State As He Runs To Lead It

SACRAMENTO, California — Steve Hilton says artificial intelligence founders have only themselves to blame for tanking public confidence in their industry, a striking indictment from the Republican running for California’s top office.

Hilton, a former Fox News personality making a long-shot run for governor, called out OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei for fueling deep suspicion of the emerging technology.

“The narrative that they've been spinning for years has just been catastrophic for public trust in their own industry,” Hilton said at POLITICO’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit on Tuesday. “Endless, doom-laden predictions about what the things that they're working on are going to do to our economy and our society, I think have fed this.”

The former British policy adviser argued voter frustration targeted at data centers is a result of angst propagated by industry players. The critical tone, coming from the Republican at the top of the ticket in the home of Silicon Valley, was a remarkable sign of the tech-skeptical populism that has spread across the U.S. and party lines.

Hilton, who still texts and calls from a flip phone, has had a close view of the industry’s communication strategy while married to a veteran communications chief for companies including Google and Facebook. He said that AI leaders’ acknowledging risks posed by unchecked artificial intelligence development has proved to be damning for public relations.

“They're sitting there thinking, ‘Oh everybody hates us,’” Hilton said of the AI founders. “Yeah, I wonder why? It's because you told them to fear what you're building.”

Hilton, who advanced in June to a November run-off against former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra in a state where Democrats are the strong favorite, said risks of AI — particularly to children — are real, but that governments had done a poor job of regulating the technology.

“We're under regulating some of the harms, for example, in relation to children and in relation to the creative community and their output, but we're in danger of overregulating some of the potential benefits,” he said.