Why Grindr’s Ceo Wants The Gay Dating App To Get Deeper Into Ai

Grindr CEO George Arison tries to avoid discussing politics. But he and the popular gay dating app he leads are making a play for influence both in Sacramento and Washington.

Grindr recently announced it washosting a buzzy party as part of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner weekend. And now Arison, like many of California’s tech executives, is backing San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan to be the next governor.

Mahan, a moderate Democrat, is making anaggressive fundraising and advertising push after Eric Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race and resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual assault. Arison, however, says he’s been a fan of Mahan for years.

The longtime Bay Area resident sent Mahan’s campaign a $7,000 check this week and expressed his increasing frustration with the state’s direction in an interview with POLITICO Magazine.

“I like living here for professional reasons. I like living here for the environment,” Arison said, echoing sentiments from a politically reawakened Silicon Valley. “But I hate living here for the fact that we have a state government that is quite bigger than the one a decade ago that provides less services.”

Grindr has been a California-based company since it was founded in Los Angeles in 2009 and remains headquartered in West Hollywood, despite atumultuous stint under Chinese ownership.

Since Arison became CEO in 2022, he’s wanted to remake the dating app into an AI-focused company by applying automation to its troves of data. Grindr began rolling out some of those AI features for paid users this year.

“I got excited about this job because I knew AI was going to become very big,” said Arison, who previously co-founded the startup Pulsar AI. He added that Grindr’s advantage was having “all the users and then also the data.”

When it comes to AI regulation, Arison favors the Trump administration’s light-touch strategy over Sacramento’s ideas for overseeing risks posed by advanced models, like its landmark safety and transparency law SB 53. He is vehemently against a data center moratorium or ban, blasting its proponents as “demagogues.”

Arison, who once faced online backlash after describing himself as a conservative, also called recent suggestions from OpenAI to establish a public wealth fund and incentivize 32-hour workweek pilot programs to deal with disruption from AI “ridiculous.” The AI labs, he said, “are full of people who are not capitalists.”

The following conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Are there ways that AI has made your job harder? Deepfakes come to mind.

The same tool that you can use to build really cool things can be used to create more spam and more bad actors. We are in a constant whack-a-mole with that, and we’ve seen some really tough spam that previously wouldn't have happened, frankly. But now it's much more aggressive, and that's probably thanks to AI. So that's a real problem.

The not-yet-real problem, but one that I think many companies will be facing is security. Because every technology has some unknown doors that are not closed, and the goal of a hacker is to come and find those doors. But if a hacker can suddenly send you many agents to go look for those doors, the likelihood of doors being found is higher, so you need tools on the other side that are going to protect you, and the security protocols have not yet caught up with the new risks.

What’s the role of the state in the AI future? 

I actually think that the strategy the [Trump] administration came up with is pretty good. It should be to unleash the potential of AI as much as possible, [making it] as accessible and as advanced as it can be. And ensure that we beat China and other evil countries.

There have been more ideas that have emerged recently from the industry. OpenAI proposed some policy ideas, including a public wealth fund and pilots for a 32-hour work week. 

That’s like socialist. Ridiculous. The answer isn’t less capitalism. The answer is more capitalism. The answer is how do we enable more people to be entrepreneurs? How do we unleash the potential of AI to create more manifest destiny for the future, to create things that previously were not possible? How do we go mine asteroids, and how do we build a colony on the moon? And how do we build a colony on Mars and create jobs through all that? Humans like to work. It’s contrary to human nature to suggest they want to have a check sent to them every day so they don't work.

The solution to disruption isn't to say, ‘Oh, disruption is going to happen, so let's just assume people can’t be any better than that, and we just need to keep them on welfare.’ That's a really big problem with the fact that both of the AI labs are full of people who are not capitalists. Like it's a real, real problem because they're using capitalism to advance their companies, but really they're now utilizing those companies to advance very anti-capitalist notions, and that will be a humongous problem for us.

What do you make of how California has approached the technology? Has it struck the right balance? 

The AI law that they tried to pass two years ago [SB 1047] was horrible, and the one that they actually signed [SB 53] was slightly better but still not very good — because it’s large company protectionism. Large companies can abide by all the things that are in there, but small companies can have a harder time, which basically incentivizes larger companies and makes it harder for startups to challenge them.

[SB 53’s strictest requirements apply to companies with annual revenues exceeding $500 million, though pro-“Little Tech” lobbyists wanted a higher threshold.]

How much credit do you give the state for the AI boom? 

I give credit to Elon Musk, Sam Altman and the people that they brought in to OpenAI. And then Google buying DeepMind. That’s what led to the AI boom. The state had nothing to do with it.

If anything, the state gets in the way because all of us struggle with the idea of living here. I’ve been in California for a very long time. It’s one of the most nice places in the country to live in for the environmental ambiance. It feels really good to be outside. But it’s a very not-conducive-to-raising-a-family place. And we constantly struggle between: I like living here for professional reasons, I like living here for the environment, but I hate living here for the fact that we have a state government that is quite bigger than the one a decade ago that provides less services, and kids don't get educated. And roads are terrible. Electricity goes out regularly.

With the governor’s race, California will have a new leader soon. Do you have a preference?

I’m supporting Matt Mahan. In general, I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t want Grindr involved in politics at all.

We do have a public policy team, and most of what that team does is focus on things that our users need, rather than company needs. Like ensuring that HIV preventative and treatment funding continues to be available, decriminalization of being gay around the world, protecting gay marriage whenever necessary. I do get involved in that work a lot, and I do sometimes give money to campaigns when it makes sense, but very seldom.

Grindr has an adults-only policy. You’ve also acknowledged in the past that the app is susceptible to bad actors and abuse. How do you prevent misuse and keep underage users out? 

Keeping underage users [out] is one of the top priorities we have. I'm a dad of six-year-olds. I do not want my children anywhere near Grindr. We believe that the best way to use modern technology for that is to have either app store-level or phone-level verification. What California has done at the phone level — what Texas and Utah have done as well at the app store level, even though those are hung up in litigation right now — we think are very good solutions. And we want the federal government to do the same thing.

We don’t want to ask for your face because we want you to be discreet if that's what you want. But in the U.K. now, we have to ask you for your face because that's part of our age verification flow. I think that approach is really bad. I'm very glad California did not go that route.

As for Newsom’s recent endorsement of a social media age gate — I don't have a business point of view on this. But as a parent, I'm not going to let my kids use social media until they're like 14 or 16 years old. There’s no way.

Some LGBTQ advocates, in reaction to the federal bills you’re supporting and state legislation, have warned that age-gating chills free speech and could lead to censorship. Do you disagree?

We just don’t agree with that. I know those groups. I respect the work that they do, but we cannot ignore that minors on the internet is a real problem in many different areas, and that the idea that parents should not have a role in giving consent for minors’ behavior is not right.

It’s very damaging because it’s an argument that doesn’t make sense to most people. It certainly doesn’t make any sense to most parents. And the result of it is that you could have a response from the political actor that is even more negative and bad than the one you could have if everyone got together and agreed [on] some level of rules to verify identity.

Sacramento lawmakers are considering a bill that would require dating apps to standardize and publicly disclose their safety policies. How much coordination is there currently between Grindr and other sites like Hinge and Tinder? 

There isn’t any.

Should there be more? Specifically on user safety standards.

I don't think that’s necessary. I can talk to other partners when necessary, and we do. I’m not saying we are not talking. But that implies a little bit too much censorship risk, and I don't like that.

A version of this story first appeared in California Decoded, POLITICO’s morning newsletter for Pros about how the Golden State is shaping tech policy within its borders and beyond. Like this content? POLITICO Pro subscribers receive it daily. Learn more at www.politicopro.com.