Draft Moskovitz: The Best Last Hope for Constructive AI Governance

• AI News Team
• March 8, 2026

​Introduction:The next presidential election represents a significant opportunity for advocates of AI safety to influence government policy. Depending on the timeline for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), it may also be one of the last U.S. elections capable of meaningfully shaping the long-term trajectory of AI governance. Given his longstanding commitment to AI safety and support for institutions working to mitigate existential risks, I advocate for Dustin Moskovitz to run for president. I expect that a Moskovitz presidency would substantially increase the likelihood that U.S. AI policy prioritizes safety. Even if such a campaign would be unlikely to win outright, supporting it would still be justified, as such a campaign would elevate AI Safety onto the national spotlight, influence policy discussions, and facilitate the creation of a pro-AI-Safety political network.The Case for AI Governance: Governments are needed to promote AI safety because the dynamics of AI development make voluntary caution difficult, and because AI carries unprecedented risk and transformative potential. Furthermore, the US government can make a huge difference for a relatively insignificant slice of its budget.The Highly Competitive Nature of AI and a Potential Race to the Bottom:There’s potentially a massive first-mover advantage in AI. The first group to develop transformative AI could theoretically secure overwhelming economic power by utilizing said AI to kick off a chain of recursive self improvement, where first human AI researchers gain dramatic productivity boosts by using AI, then AI itself. Even without recursive improvement, however, being a first mover in transformational AI could still have dramatic benefits.Incentives are distorted accordingly. Major labs are pressured to move fast and cut corners—or risk being outpaced. Slowing down for safety often feels like unilateral disarmament. Even well-intentioned actors are trapped in a race-to-the-bottom dynamic, as all your efforts to ensuring your model is safe is not that relevant if an AI system developed by another, less scrupulous company becomes more advanced than your safer models. Anthropic puts it best when they write “Our hypothesis is that being at the frontier of AI development is the most effective way to steer its trajectory towards positive societal outcomes.” The actions of other top AI companies also reflect this dynamic, with many AI firms barely meeting basic safety standards.This is exactly the kind of environment where governance is most essential. Beyond my own analysis, here is what notable advocates of AI safety have said on the necessity of government action and the insufficiency of corporate self-regulation: “‘My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely,’ he said.  ‘The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation.’”Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize Winner for contributions to AI, in an interview with the Guardian in 2024 “I don’t think we’ve done what it takes yet in terms of mitigating risk. There’s been a lot of global conversation, a lot of legislative proposals, the UN is starting to think about international treaties — but we need to go much further. {…} There’s a conflict of interest between those who are building these machines, expecting to make tons of money and competing against each other with the public. We need to manage that conflict, just like we’ve done for tobacco, like we haven’t managed to do with fossil fuels. We can’t just let the forces of the market be the only force driving forward how we develop AI.”Yoshua Bengio, recipient of the Turing Award, in an interview with Live Science in 2024. “Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.”Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI safety advocate and founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, writing in Time Magazine in 2023.The Magnitude of AI Risks:Beyond the argument from competition, there is also the question about who gets to make key decisions about what type of risks should be taken in the development of AI. If AI has the power to permanently transform society or even destroy it, it makes sense to leave critical decisions about safety to pluralistic institutions rather than unaccountable tech tycoons. Without transparency, accountability, and clear safety guidelines, the risk for AI catastrophe seems much higher. To illustrate this point, imagine if a family member of a leader of a major AI company (or the leader themselves) gets late stage cancer or another serious medical condition that is difficult to treat with current technology. It is conceivable that the leader would attempt to develop AI faster in order to increase their or their family member’s personal chance of survival, whereas it would be in the best interest of the society to delay development for safety reasons. While it is possible that workers in these AI companies would speak out against the leader’s decisions, it is unclear what could be done if the leader in this example decided against their employees’ advice.This scenarios is not the most likely but there are many similar scenarios and I think it illustrates that the risk appetites, character, and other unique attributes of the leaders and decision makers of these AI companies can materially affect the levels of AI safety that are applied in AI development. While government is not completely insulated from this phenomenon, especially in short timeline scenarios, ideally an AI safety party would be able to facilitate the creation of institutions which would utilize the viewpoints of many diverse AI researchers, business leaders, and community stakeholders in order to create an AI-governance framework which will not give any one (potentially biased) individual the power to unilaterally make decisions on issues of great importance regarding AI safety (such as when and how to deploy or develop highly advanced AI systems). The Vast Scope and Influence of Government:Finally, I think the massive resources of government is an independent reason to support government action on AI safety. Even if you think corporations can somewhat effectively self-regulate on AI and you are opposed to a general pause on AI development, there is no reason the US government shouldn’t and can’t spend 100 billion dollars a year on AI safety research. This number would be over 20 times greater than 3.7 billion, which was Open AI’s total estimated revenue in 2024, but <15% of US defense spending. Ultimately, the US government has more flexibility to support AI safety than corporations, owing simply to its massive size.The Insufficiency of current US Action on AI Safety:Despite many compelling reasons existing for the US government to act on AI safety, the US government has never taken significant action on AI safety, and the current administration has actually gone backwards in many respects. Despite claims to the contrary, the recent AI action plan is a profound step away from AI safety, and I would encourage anyone to read it. The first “pillar” of the plan is literally “Accelerate AI Innovation” and the first prong of that first pillar is to “Remove Red Tape and Onerous Regulation”, citing the Biden Administration’s executive action on AI (referred to as the “Biden administration’s dangerous actions”) as an example, despite the fact the executive order did not actually do much and was mainly trying to lay the groundwork for future regulations on AI. The AI Action plan also proposes government investment to advance AI capabilities, suggesting to “Prioritize investment into theoretical computational and experimental research to preserve America’s leadership in discovering new and transformative paradigms that advance the capabilities of AI”, and while the AI Action plan does acknowledge the importance of “interpretability, control, and robustness breakthroughs”, it receives only about two paragraphs in a 28 page report (25 if you remove pages with fewer than 50 words).However, as disappointing the current administration’s stance on AI Safety may be, the previous administration was not an ideal model. According to this post NSF spending on AI safety was only 20 million dollars between 2023 and 2024, and this was ostensibly the main source of direct government support for AI safety. To put that number into perspective, the US Department of Defense spent an estimated 820.3 billion US dollars in FY 2023, and meaning the collective amount spent by represented only approximately 0.00244% of the US Department of Defense spending in FY 2023.Many people seem to believe that governments will inevitably pivot to promoting an AI safety agenda at some point, but we shouldn’t just stand around waiting for that to happen while lobbyists funded by big AI companies are actively trying to shape the government’s AI agenda. The Power of the Presidency:The US president could unilaterally take a number of actions relevant for AI Safety. For one, the president could use powers under the IEEPA to essentially block the exports of chips to adversary nations, potentially slowing down foreign AI development and giving the US more leverage in international talks on AI. The same law could also limit the export of such models, shifting the bottom line of said AI companies dramatically. The president could also use the Defense Production Act to require companies to be more transparent about their use and development of AI models, something which also would significantly affect AI Safety. This is just scratching the surface, but beyond what the president could do directly, over the last two administrations we have seen that both houses of congress have largely went along with the president when a single party controlled all three branches of government. Based on the assumption that a Moskovitz presidency would result in a trifecta, it should be easy for him to influence congress to pass sweeping AI regulation that gives the executive branch a ton of additional power to regulate AI.Long story short, effective AI governance likely requires action from the US federal government, and that would basically require presidential support. Even if generally sympathetic to AI safety, a presidential candidate who does not have a track record of supporting AI Safety will likely be far slower at supporting AI regulation, international AI treaties, and AI Safety investment, and this is a major deal.The Case for Dustin Moskovitz:Many people care deeply about the safe development of artificial intelligence. However, from the perspective of someone who cares about AI Safety, a strong presidential candidate would need more than a clear track record of advancing efforts in this area. They would also need the capacity to run a competitive campaign and the competence to govern effectively if elected.However, one of the central difficulties in identifying such candidates is that most individuals deeply involved in AI safety come from academic or research-oriented backgrounds. While these figures contribute immensely to the field’s intellectual progress, their careers often lack the public visibility, executive experience, or broad-based credibility traditionally associated with successful political candidates. Their expertise, though invaluable, rarely translates into electoral viability.Dustin Moskovitz represents a rare exception. Dustin Moskovitz is a co-founder of Facebook and Asana (a company which sells productivity software) and also co-founded Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy), one of the largest effective altruist organizations in the world. As a leading advocate and funder within the AI safety community, he possesses both a deep commitment to mitigating existential risks and the professional background to appeal to conventional measures of success. His entrepreneurial record and demonstrated capacity for large-scale organization lend him a kind of legitimacy that bridges the gap between the technical world of AI safety and the public expectations of political leadership. Beyond this, his financial resources also will allow him to quickly get his campaign off the ground and focus less on donations than other potential candidates, a major boon for a presidential nominee. In a political environment dominated by short-term incentives, a candidate like Moskovitz—who combines financial independence, proven managerial ability, and a principled concern for the long-term survival of humanity—embodies an unusually strong alignment between competence, credibility, and conscience.The Value of a Moskovitz Presidency:The best way to assess the impact of a Moskovitz presidency on AI Safety is to compare him to potential alternative presidents. On the Republican side, prediction markets currently favor J. D Vance, who famously stated at an AI summit: “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building — from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.”Yikes.On the Democrat side, things aren’t much better. Few Democratic politicians with presidential ambitions have clearly committed themselves to supporting AI Safety, and even if they would hypothetically support some AI Safety initiatives, they would clearly be less prepared to do so than a hypothetical President Moskovitz.Is this Actually Feasible?:I believe that if Dustin Moskovitz decided to run for president today with the support of the rationalist and effective altruist communities, he would have a non-zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination. The current Democratic bench is not especially strong. Figures such as Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both face significant limitations as national candidates. Firstly, Newsom’s record in California could be fruitful ground for opponents. California has seen substantial out-migration over the past several years, with many residents leaving for states with lower housing costs and fewer regulatory barriers. At the same time, California faces a severe housing affordability crisis driven by restrictive zoning, slow permitting processes, and high construction costs. These issues have become national talking points and have raised questions about the effectiveness of governance in a state often seen as a policy model for the Democratic Party. AOC, on the other hand, has relatively limited executive experience, and might not even run in the first place. I also think opponents can make a persuasive case on electability, as AOC has been a boogey-man of the right for years.Although Moskovitz’s wealth could be a liability in the 2028 Democratic primaries, Moskovitz’s outsider status and independence from the traditional political establishment could make him more competitive in a general election. Unlike long-serving politicians, he would enter the race without decades of partisan baggage or controversial votes. Furthermore, listening to Moskovitz speak, he comes across as thoughtful and generally personable. While it is difficult to judge how effective he would be as a campaigner based only on interviews, there is little evidence suggesting he would struggle to communicate his ideas or connect with voters. Given his experience building and leading organizations, as well as his involvement in major philanthropic initiatives, it is plausible that he could translate those skills into a disciplined and competent campaign.Nevertheless, I pose a simple question: if not now then when? If the people will only respond to a pro-AI regulation message only after they are unemployed, then there is no hope for AI governance anyways, because by the time AI is directly threatening to cause mass unemployment, it will likely be too late to do anything. Is Feasibility All that Matters?:Even if Dustin Moskovitz is unable to win the Democratic nomination, he could potentially gather enough support to play kingmaker in a crowded field and gain substantial leverage over the eventual Democratic nominee. As a commenter, Mitchell_Porter, on a previous version of this post pointed out this could result in Dustin Moskovitz becoming the AI czar of a future Democratic administration.  out Furthermore, if Moskovitz runs for president, it would provide a blueprint and precedence for future candidates who support AI safety. This, combined with the attention the Moskovitz campaign would bring towards AI Safety, could help justify the Moskovitz campaign on consequentialist grounds. What About Activism?:Grassroots movements, while capable of profound social transformation, often operate on timescales far too slow to meaningfully influence AI governance within the short window humanity has to address the technology’s risks. Even if one doubts the practicality of persuading a future president to prioritize AI safety, such a top-down approach may remain the only plausible way to achieve near-term impact. History offers sobering reminders of how long bottom-up change can take. The civil rights movement, one of the most successful in American history, required nearly a decade—beginning around 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education—to achieve its landmark legislative victories, despite decades of groundwork laid by organizations like the NAACP beforehand. The women’s suffrage movement took even longer: from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, over seventy years passed before American women secured the right to vote. Similarly, the American anti-nuclear movement succeeded in slowing the growth of nuclear energy but failed to eliminate nuclear weapons or ensure lasting disarmament, and many of its limited gains have since eroded.Against this historical backdrop, the idea of a successful AI safety grassroots movement seems implausible. The issue is too abstract, too technical, and too removed from everyday life to inspire widespread public action. Unlike civil rights, women’s suffrage, or nuclear proliferation—issues that directly touched people’s identities, freedoms, or survival—AI safety feels theoretical and distant to most citizens. While it is conceivable that economic disruption from automation might eventually stir public unrest, such a reaction would almost certainly come too late to steer the direction of AI development. Worse, mass discontent could be easily defused by the major AI corporations through material concessions, such as the introduction of a universal basic income, without addressing the underlying safety or existential concerns. In short, the historical sluggishness of grassroots reform, combined with the abstract nature of the AI problem, suggests that bottom-up mobilization is unlikely to arise—or to matter—before the most consequential decisions about AI are already made.What About Lobbying?:One major way in which people who care to influence governmental support for AI safety policies have sought to influence government has been through lobbying organizations and other forms of activism. However, there is reason to doubt they will be able to cause lasting change. First of all, there is significant evidence that lobbying has a status quo bias lobbying has a status quo bias. Lobbying is most effective when it relates to preventing changes, and when there are two groups of lobbyists on an issue, the lobbying to prevent change win out, all else being equal. In fact, according to a study by Dr. Amy McKay, “it takes 3.5 lobbyists working for a new proposal to counteract just one lobbyist working against it”.Even if this effect did not exist, however, it is very unlikely AI safety groups will be able to compete with anti-AI-safety lobbyists. Naturally, the rise of large, transnational organizations built to profit around AI has also lead to a powerful pro-AI lobbyist operation. This indicates we can’t simply rely on current strategies of simply funding AI-safety advocacy organizations, as they will be eclipsed by better funded pro-AI-Business voices.Conclusion:While having Dustin Moskovitz run for office would be far from a guarantee, it is the best way for pro-AI-Safety Americans to influence AI governance before 2030.  LessWrong users seconds before being disassembled by AI-controlled nanobots This post has been written with the assistance of Chat-Gpt, and the images in this post were generated by Copilot, Gemini, and Chat-Gpt.Discuss ​Read More