The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve

Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability. Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit. Sign up for future editions here.

“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.

Much of Donald Trump’s unpopularity in polls stems from dissatisfaction over the economy and war on Iran

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Use of tools ‘may result in the transfer of sensitive data’ to China, defense department says

The US government on Monday ordered its agencies to stop using artificial intelligence (AI) tools from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, as the countries race for dominance in the fast-moving sector.

A notice from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the ban on products developed by DeepSeek – and tools created using DeepSeek by third parties – saying they must be removed from IT devices.

AI is increasingly getting good at doing some tasks, but it can never replace human workers’ judgment

Autonomous cars, which may be the safest we have built, keep getting easily avoidable parking tickets. While Waymos crash far less often than human drivers over tens of millions of miles, they’re still terrible at performing basic tasks – keeping out of disabled parking spots and tow-away zones, or steering clear of a church garage during Sunday service, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is the state of AI today: impressively capable at something complex, yet embarrassingly clumsy at something easy. And it has implications for what work will remain human and what will be automated by AI.

Madhu Shashanka is co-founder, chief scientist and chief technology officer at Concentric AI, a data security software company