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“We are living through the greatest transformation that we have seen in our lifetimes, and likely for a significant time before that,” two-time Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told an audience at New York City’s flagship public library on Oct. 28, comparing the advent of artificial intelligence to the advent of nuclear weaponry in terms of the need for carefully thought out safety standards. “We're at a branch point,” he added. “What should the future really look like, what are we trying to protect and preserve?”

Murthy was not alone in sounding the alarm. Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, the organizer of the conference, told the mostly supportive crowd that recent history had proved that the industry leaders or, as he called them “tech broligarchs,” could not be relied upon to create digital information systems that were safe or healthy for children. “We did not get out in front of social media in time,” he told the gathering. “This is the moment. AI is a bigger deal. It's basically social media on steroids.” 

New York’s governor Kathy Hochul seemed to underscore the point when she made an unscheduled stop at the daylong summit to announce new regulations around chatbots interactions with children. The bill was designed to ensure that AI agents do not impersonate humans or communicate in a way that suggests they have a relationship with a child. “It's happening so quickly,” said Hochul of the technological changes. “It's almost impossible for parents to know what's going on, for elected officials to stay ahead of it, and we certainly have learned the lesson that we can't count on the companies to put out products that are responsible and that put children first.”

Specifically, the new law, which goes into effect in January, will ban chatbots from encouraging suicide, self-harm, secrecy, or isolation and from discouraging children to seek help from other humans. They will also be banned from engaging in sexually explicit interactions and restricted from using a child’s past personal or health information in later conversations.

For the attendees and speakers at the summit, who ranged from Chelsea Clinton and Columbia law professor Tim Wu (onstage) to Uma Thurman (in the audience), the announcement was a good start, although many bemoaned the lack of federal regulation, around both AI and social media. “To this day, 2026, our federal government and Congress has still—nearly a quarter century after the advent of social media—failed to announce anything to protect our kids,” said Murthy, who is now chair of the advisory board of Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute, which studies, tests, and rates AI platforms for children. 

Panelists called for a range of protective and preventative remedies for what they described as the coming tsunami of AI, including requiring more data transparency from tech companies by enabling regulatory agencies and researchers to get more access to the information they’re holding, using consumer-protection laws to ensure that AI models have been rigorously tested for potential negative outcomes, adopting the European model of not allowing AI companies to deploy their platforms until they have proved they are safe, or even instituting criminal penalties for AI companies who unleash unsafe technologies. “As a former prosecutor, I can tell you one thing,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who earlier this month won a $25 billion judgment against Meta. “When you bring out handcuffs, suddenly everything changes.”

Not all the issues around AI can be solved by the law, however. One concern is the socialization of very young children by AI, including via voice-activated assistants like Alexa or very agreeable AI-enabled toys. “What do kids start to learn to expect from social practice? Do they expect someone to always agree with them? Is it always easy? Is it always like a transaction?” asked Dana Suskind, an early-childhood expert and professor at the University of Chicago. Human relationships are a lot messier, she noted. “They're chaotic, and that sort of mess is where a lot of learning happens.” Parents, who were caught off-guard by the influence of social media and digital devices, need to be educated about AI and encouraged that their imperfect parenting, as well as other human interaction, is vastly more beneficial to children than an AI companion, she said.

The summit also touched on the enormous implications AI is having on education and students’ ability to work and learn, when answers are in such ready supply. “MIT just did a report saying every assignment at MIT could be done by generative AI,” said John King, a former U.S. Secretary of Education and current chancellor of State University in New York. King is considering major changes to student assessment. “We have to make sure we are seeing the students do the work, and we have to make sure they're getting those foundational skills,” he said. “It literally means every faculty member reassessing what they assign and how they measure student learning.” And, as Clinton pointed out, this is an equity issue too. “We know that in families with less than $30,000 of household income, teenagers are three times more likely to either largely or entirely do their homework through artificial intelligence than those households with family incomes of $75,000 or more,” she said. 

At the same time, students need to be prepared to enter a workforce in which AI skills are not optional. For those who have mastered them, the future is very bright. “The people coming in learn much more rapidly because AI gives them more capacity than they've had before,” said Gene Sykes, chairman of global mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs of the banking giant’s new recruits. “So somebody, within a month, can be doing incredibly productive work.” If good education in AI is distributed unevenly, some graduates will be vastly better prepared for a career than others, further exacerbating wealth inequities.

While there was little consensus on the immediate steps to take as AI arrives, there was no argument that it will be consequential for children, families, and generations to come. “As we go into this age of transformation,” Murthy noted, “the question forced upon us is the following: What aspects of human existence do we want to protect and preserve at all costs?” 

The top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees are demanding that President Donald Trump preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots as part of an inquiry into whether Elon Musk’s AI system Grok has influenced official White House policy. The demand offers a preview of the intense scrutiny Trump would face in the final years of his presidency if Democrats reclaim the House in next week’s midterm elections.

In a letter to Trump, unveiled Oct. 30, Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California call on the President to preserve “any prompts” submitted to AI chatbots, including Musk’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude, while “carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties,” along with the responses the chatbots generated. They also request a briefing on the matter by 5 p.m. on Nov. 11. Raskin and Garcia would be in line to chair the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, respectively, if Democrats win the House.

The request stems from a TIME report earlier this month detailing a previously undisclosed December 2025 meeting between Trump and Musk in the Oval Office. According to an official who was present, Trump spent hours asking Grok questions about his presidency and legacy.

At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes on Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the United States. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured President Nicolás Maduro. The chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator whose downfall many Venezuelans would likely celebrate, the official said. The following month, Trump ordered a military operation to seize Maduro, and celebrations erupted in the streets of Venezuela. Trump came away convinced that Grok was ingenious, according to officials familiar with his thinking.

The lawmakers cited TIME’s reporting that Trump sought Grok’s “advice on carrying out some of your presidential duties,” including asking it to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to Maduro’s capture. Just “weeks later,” they noted, Trump “ordered the U.S. military, without congressional authorization, to attack Venezuela and capture President Maduro.” 

They called the episode “deeply troubling,” arguing that Trump “consulted Grok—but not Congress—on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone.” The White House’s use of AI chatbots, they warned, “exposes the United States to acute national security risks” and leaves the country vulnerable to “malign influence from unknown and unaccountable third parties.”

A Trump Administration official says that the White House “preserves all required records in accordance with the law” but declined to answer specific questions stemming from the letter. A spokesperson for Musk did not respond to requests for comment. 

The preservation demand rests on the Presidential Records Act, enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which makes presidential records the property of the public and requires that they be filed separately from personal materials. In 2014, lawmakers passed amendments that extended the law to include electronic records. The principle of preservation, the statute said, applied to the content of the information rather than the medium that holds it, a standard that on its face would seem to reach chatbot exchanges tied to official duties. 

But the statute itself does not mention AI, and the most direct federal guidance, from the National Archives, covers agencies under the separate Federal Records Act. That language treats prompts and outputs as likely records only if they are captured and saved in an agency system, a caveat critics say limits its reach for commercial chatbots. In April, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel declared the Act unconstitutional, although the White House has told a court its staff are still preserving materials related to their work. A federal judge ordered the administration in May to preserve presidential records for now.

The dispute comes as Democrats are preparing for the possibility of reclaiming congressional investigative powers after two years in the minority. A Democratic-controlled House could use committee hearings, document requests, and subpoenas to examine how Trump and his advisers have conducted official business, including the extent to which emerging technologies have entered the administration’s decision-making process.

Whether the White House complies with the Democrats’ demand, ignores it, or fights it could offer an early glimpse of the confrontations that await Trump in the final years of his presidency.

For the last year, I’ve been asking corporate executives how they might expect anticipated Democratic victories in the midterm elections to shape the future of the U.S. climate and energy agenda. I was surprised how often they gave the same answer: investigations. 

Democratic control of congressional committees would give Democrats new subpoena power and new dedicated staff to conduct investigations. Companies may be compelled to turn over documents, and CEOs could be called to testify before Congress about how they have approached a range of issues. 

Corporate executives have largely worried about staying on the right side of President Trump over the last few years. But a Democratic Congress would introduce a competing political pressure—and potentially change how companies talk about climate and energy. 

Climate may not be a top priority on its own for Democratic politicians in 2026, but it will come up in Washington for two key reasons. The first is rising fuel and power costs. Democrats in Congress will want to probe how companies have responded to current energy market conditions triggered in part by rapid growth in demand for AI and the war in Iran, and whether their actions have raised costs. You can expect those questions to take a pro-clean energy bent. And then there is the corruption discussion, which has emerged as a key theme in Democratic midterm campaigning. Democrats will want to probe any company or industry that is perceived to be close with the administration, including the oil and gas industry. 

In September, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, released a report that gives a hint at the expected line of argument. It highlights donations from oil and gas executives and links them to the Trump Administration’s regulatory rollback. And, to conclude, it suggests that those decisions have contributed to higher prices for consumers. 

For understandable reasons, analyses of how the election might shape the future of energy and climate tend to focus on policy outcomes. And there are many areas to follow closely. The results will shape efforts to pass a permitting reform bill in the time between the election and when new members of Congress take office in January. And members will debate funding levels for clean energy programs that survived cuts under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year. We will also see the seeds of bigger discussions about how the U.S. might rethink its approach to climate change if Democrats regain the White House, too. 

But the bigger story may indeed be the zeitgeist shift that a big Democratic wave would portend. Investigations and congressional testimony will force companies to answer questions in the public sphere that they have largely been able to elide recently. What is the role of clean energy in the power system? How might clean energy affect competitiveness? And how are you approaching risks related to climate change? 

In this new environment, incentives change. A utility CEO might emphasize the role of renewables in bringing down costs. A bank might underscore how it’s financing clean energy technologies. And an oil-and-gas CEO might focus on how they’re cutting methane emissions. In general, executives decline to speak on the record about how they are preparing, but in background conversations the story is clear. Companies are lawyering up. Public relations firms are crafting modulated messages to address concerns. And CEOs are reaching out to Democratic members of Congress to plead their case. 

For the last several years, many businesses have either tip-toed around Trump or openly embraced him, out of fear that doing otherwise would harm the bottom line. A new Congress with Democrats in charge would remind the corporate world that Trump is not the only force to be feared. And, perhaps, it would give CEOs cover to embrace a grounded climate agenda.