Previously, I'd written about my support for Alex Bores and Scott Wiener, who are running for Congress. I wanted to highlight another person who's running for office, namely Will Dreher, who's running for the Washington State House. As far as I know (I haven't checked thoroughly), he holds the distinction of being the first serious candidate for elected office to put AI as the top issue on his platform.

Dreher's platform talks about a number of risks from AI, ranging from risks that are already widely discussed in politics (such as deepfakes and job displacement) to catastrophic and existential risks. Based on my conversations with him, it seems to me like he's taking catastrophic and existential risks from AI pretty seriously and is interested in pushing for legislation that mitigates those risks.

Some quotes from his platform that I like:

• "AI companies’ billionaire (soon to be trillionaire) CEOs, meanwhile, alone are deciding pressing public questions like what guardrails will apply to AI’s military applications or whether to release potentially dangerous new models that could pose catastrophic risks, like cyberattacks, loss of control, or bioengineered pandemics. Yet these companies have shown no willingness to slow down—indeed, they have pledged to fight state attempts to regulate them."
• "I will... pass legislation addressing the catastrophic risks that certain AI applications pose, including right-to-warn protections for AI employees who perceive risks from their companies’ work, regulatory audits and controls that apply before even internal deployment of new models, and required transparency by AI companies of risks flagged internally during safety testing."

I think that Washington is one of the more important states for AI regulation, as a number of AI companies have big offices there. So I'm excited to have an AI safety champion in the Washington legislature. A number of donors who are concerned about catastrophic/existential risk and want to see greater regulation of frontier AI companies have donated to him, and I think further donations are worthwhile. You can donate up to $2.4k here if you'd like (donate via this link, rather than directly through his website).