🗳️ AI backlash heads to the polls

The Rundown AINov 2, 2026

Good morning, AI enthusiasts, and welcome to our 8,118 new readers. AI spent the last two years winning over Washington. This week, it faces a tougher crowd: voters ready to hit the polls and evict the buildout from their own backyards.

With data centers now a defining midterm issue, OpenAI already floating a new name for them, and control of the House up for grabs, AI’s next wave of construction could get a lot harder — no matter what the industry decides to call it.

In today’s AI rundown:

Data centers hit the ballot as OpenAI plots a rebrand
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Make AI artwork you can actually edit
Google’s space data center sends home a haiku

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI & POLITICS

🗳️ Data centers hit the ballot as OpenAI plots a rebrand

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Rundown: This week’s U.S. midterms double as a referendum on data centers, with roughly 20 communities voting on bans or pauses, while OpenAI reportedly prepares a post-election push to rebrand the sites as “AI compute campuses.”

The details:

Democrats are projected to flip the House Tuesday, which could end a two-year run of easy treatment in Washington for AI firms with close ties to Pres. Trump.
Some Democrats want a federal freeze on new data centers, including House hopefuls Will Lawrence in Michigan and Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin.
The White House already got tech giants to voluntarily supply their own power, and last week Trump floated having developers pay locals a “dividend” as well.
OpenAI is planning to pitch the campuses as local economic boosts, citing a Pike County, Ohio, project it’s helping build that promises thousands of jobs.
OpenAI policy chief Chris Lehane called the debate “democracy in action,” and the company wants state bills giving locals a voice in new projects.

Why it matters: AI has a real image problem with the public, and data centers have become one of the defining fights of Tuesday’s elections. That anger won’t be fixed by a new name or a few community perks, and a Democratic House could make life a lot harder for AI giants trying to scale their infrastructure bets against local opposition.

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Leveraging the nontextual AI frontier
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THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Nick, Video Producer:When I create video content, I pull imagery from many different sources, so my editing folder often ends up with photos that may or may not work inside my editing program. For a handful of photos, converting them manually is fine. For larger projects with dozens of images, it eats into my time and focus. I wanted something simple, lightweight on compute power, that could batch convert photos.

I asked Claude to create an app that runs on my local machine and can batch convert photos into formats I know will work in my video editor.

Claude returned an app that worked exactly the way I needed. I asked Claude to install it on my computer, and it was working within seconds. I now use the app to batch convert my photo folders before bringing them into the editor.

There are plenty of traditional ways to do this, but with Claude I got a solution that fit my workflow perfectly, and large image batches no longer slow my editing down.

Shubham, Editor: I had about $2K in contributions from past jobs stuck in a government scheme for more than two years. The portal was slow, spread across several forms, and unclear about how to withdraw the money.

I gave the task to Claude and Perplexity Comet. Claude worked through the rules and found the withdrawal route that kept my tax bill lowest. Comet then verified and implemented that route. It ran the portal in my browser, filled in and submitted the claim forms, and let me watch the screen and check each detail before submission. Two weeks later, the $2K arrived.

After that, Claude compared the amount I received with the scheme’s online statement and found a gap: interest that had not been paid out. It filed a second form for the difference, and I’m waiting for the payment now. I’ll use the same technique to solve this for my wife, too.

AI TRAINING

🎨Make AI artwork you can actually edit

The Rundown: In this guide, you’ll use Arrow 2 to create a three-part graphic for a client proposal. You’ll refine one scene, add editable headings, and change a color without generating the artwork again.

Step-by-step:

Open QuiverAI, select Arrow 2, and check that your plan includes SVG export. Install Inkscape for the final text and color changes
Paste the guide’s brief to draw a folder, review board, and laptop in one matching style. Leave space for the title and headings
Ask Arrow to replace one badge with speech bubbles. Compare the result with the original and check that the other scenes stay intact
Download the SVG and open it in Inkscape. Add the headings, then change the middle label and one screen color directly
Save the editable master and export a high-resolution PNG. Reopen both files and check the words, colors, and dimensions before sharing

Pro tip: Keep text that may change in separate text boxes. You can fix a heading or update a client’s wording without spending another generation on the artwork. Visit The Rundown University to get the full guide, materials, files, and more.

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AI, DATACENTERS, & SPACE

🛰️ Google’s space data center sends home a haiku

Image source: Google / SpaceX

The Rundown: Googlejust announced that its Project Suncatcher satellite answered its first AI prompt from orbit, with Google’s open Gemma 4 model writing a haiku in an early test of the company’s moonshot goal to put AI data centers in space.

The details:

Gemma’s haiku (Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core) reached the ground while the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai called it “a ‘hello world’ milestone,” a reference to the test programmers typically run first on a new machine.
Power is still a big constraint, with the craft able to run just one of its four Google AI chips (TPUs), and only in bursts of roughly 20 minutes.
Two more powerful satellites launching in 2027 will test the laser links a fleet needs to split one AI job, if the chips first survive radiation and heat tests.

Why it matters: An admittedly heartwarming haiku still won’t win over a public that is increasingly fed up with data centers of any kind, but moving them to orbit could eventually be a compromise that sidesteps a lot of the issues driving that anger — making this moonshot project a big one to keep an eye on.

QUICK HITS

COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY

▸ John built an AI ops team for his photography business

Today’s workflow comes from reader John Fertic:

“I run a photography business and built a three-layer AI workflow to help with daily operations, business improvement, and watching for outside changes that might affect us. It's for small business owners who don't want to monitor every source or handle every issue themselves.

The layers are an Operations Core (dashboard, estimates, schedules, reminders, project records, and other business state), a Work orchestrator with specialist AI agents, and a signal and triage system that watches platform alerts, vendor updates, local-search changes, newsletters, calendars, and marketing sources.

Work decides whether a signal actually matters and routes it to the right specialist. The WordPress and Google Business Profile specialists are connected directly to those systems through MCP/API connectors, so they can compare the incoming signal against the current state of the actual site or profile. The system brings me in only when a real decision is needed. The main benefit for me is that I don't have to personally track every source or jump into every issue.”

See the workflow on our Community Workflow Hub →

How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured in the newsletter.

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