The Impact

This week on The Impact , Addie and Hal trace a quiet but seismic shift: power moving from elected leaders to the systems they’ve built. From New York courtrooms to classrooms to campaign inboxes, AI is no longer a side project—it’s infrastructure. But when the President signals that advanced tech will be used to police speech, the stakes hit constitutional level. Addie unpacks what that means for...

California just redrew the map for artificial intelligence—with a new law forcing big AI companies to publish safety plans, report incidents, and prepare for real oversight. Hal and Addie break down what the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act means, why OpenAI’s surprising cooperation matters, and how it’s already rippling through Washington. From Congress’s bid to centralize AI...

California just redrew the map for artificial intelligence—with a new law forcing big AI companies to publish safety plans, report incidents, and prepare for real oversight. Hal and Addie break down what the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act means, why OpenAI’s surprising cooperation matters, and how it’s already rippling through Washington. From Congress’s bid to centralize AI...

This week on The Impact , Hal and Addie unpack California’s new AI law that forces big developers to publish safety frameworks, report failures, and protect whistleblowers—rules that could ripple nationwide. They dig into CMS’s plan to pilot AI in Medicare prior authorizations across six states, raising questions about what “meaningful human review” really means. They cover Meta’s launch of a supe...

This week on The Impact, Hal and Addie break down how AI in government is speeding up while guardrails tighten: GSA’s OneGov opens Meta’s Llama models to all agencies, which can cut costs and lock-in but still demands security reviews, ATO paths, model-risk management, and clear hosting and monitoring plans; Tribal nations center sovereignty with ASU’s “AI in Indian Country” convening and emerging...

This week on The Impact , Hal and Addie trace how governments are moving from scattered AI pilots to playbooks that shape budgets, jobs, and even the power grid. They break down GAO’s nearly 100 new federal AI requirements, Seattle’s ban on emotion-reading and social scoring, and state wins like Austin’s permit streamlining and California’s traffic safety models. The conversation covers Senator Cr...

This week on The Impact, Hal and Addie break down the government’s AI acceleration—and the ROI warning signs. We cover GSA’s OneGov deal giving feds a year of Microsoft 365 Copilot at no extra cost, Azure sweeteners, FedRAMP posture, and how rivals like Perplexity for Government lower friction with cross-model access. We unpack MIT’s finding that 95% of AI efforts don’t pay off yet, Nvidia’s marke...

This week on The Impact, Hal and Addie track how AI is moving from talk to tools: the federal USAi testbed goes live, city halls draft with chatbots and tighten guardrails, and South Korean banks roll out always-on fraud AI ahead of no-fault liability. We follow the money to chips—an $8.9B U.S. equity stake in Intel and Korea’s budget push—then hit the physical limits as Mexico’s data-center boom...

This week on The Impact , Hal and Addie unpack how money and rules are shaping the AI landscape. They dig into the $100 million “Leading the Future” campaign backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights, Ohio’s first-in-the-nation requirement for school AI policies, and how cities like Boston are already writing their own playbooks—complete with a $30 AI-made PSA that replaced a $20,000 project. The host...

Hal and Addie break down Washington’s new AI Action Plan—open models, faster permits, and “ideological neutrality”—and why power, chips, and rules now set the pace. They cover West-Texas's shot at becoming a compute hub, federal leadership changes, bipartisan guardrails, possible 300% chip tariffs, and Anthropic’s $1 Claude pilots for agencies, then share a practical playbook for builders and publ...

Welcome to the very first episode of The Impact ! Hosts Hal and Addie dive headfirst into the biggest stories where AI collides with politics and public life: the DOJ drowning in disconnected AI tools, a global arms race for chips and minerals, Spain’s eyebrow-raising Huawei deal, the U.S. cutting a controversial “pay-to-export” chip bargain with China, and Meta tapping a far-right influencer to d...