t at finding the vulnerabilities the fastest and taking advantage of them. Or,
as the defender, applying patches or mitigations the fastest.

And if you're on the inside you know what the applications do. You know what's
important and what isn't. And you can use all that internal knowledge to fix
things -- hopefully before the baddies take advantage.

Summary and prediction

Attackers will have the advantage for 3-5 years. For less-advanced defender
teams, this will take much longer.
After that point, AI/SPQA will have the additional internal context to give
Defenders the advantage.
LLM tech is nowhere near ready to handle the context of an entire company right
now. That's why this will take 3-5 years for true AI-enabled Blue to become a
thing.

And in the meantime, Red will be able to use publicly-available context from
OSINT, Recon, etc. to power their attacks.

I agree.

By the way, this is the SPQA architecture.

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AI in the 2026 Midterm Elections

[2025.10.06] We are nearly one year out from the 2026 midterm elections, and
it's far too early to predict the outcomes. But it's a safe bet that artificial
intelligence technologies will once again be a major storyline.

The widespread fear that AI would be used to manipulate the 2024 US election
seems rather quaint in a year where the president posts AI-generated images of
himself as the pope on official White House accounts. But AI is a lot more than
an information manipulator. It's also emerging as a politicized issue. Political
first-movers are adopting the technology, and that's opening a gap across party
lines.

We expect this gap to widen, resulting in AI being predominantly used by one
political side in the 2026 elections. To the extent that AI's promise to
automate and improve the effectiveness of political tasks like personalized
messaging, persuasion, and campaign strategy is even partially realized, this
could generate a systematic advantage.

Right now, Republicans look poised to exploit the technology in the 2026
midterms. The Trump White House has aggressively adopted AI-generated memes in
its online messaging strategy. The administration has also used executive orders
and federal buying power to influence the development and encoded values of AI
technologies away from "woke" ideology. Going further, Trump ally Elon Musk has
shaped his own AI company's Grok models in his own ideological image. These
actions appear to be part of a larger, ongoing Big Tech industry realignment
towards the political will, and perhaps also the values, of the Republican
party.

Democrats, as the party out of power, are in a largely reactive posture on AI. A
large bloc of Congressional Democrats responded to Trump administration actions
in April by arguing against their adoption of AI in government. Their letter to
the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget provided detailed
criticisms and questions about DOGE's behaviors and called for a halt to DOGE's
use of AI, but also said that they "support implementation of AI technologies in
a manner that complies with existing" laws. It was a perfectly reasonable, if
nuanced, position, and illustrates how the actions of one party can dictate the
political positioning of the opposing party.

These shifts are driven more by political dynamics than by ideology. Big Tech
CEOs' deference to the Trump administration seems largely an effort to curry
favor, while Silicon Valley continues to be represented by tech-forward Democrat
Ro Khanna. And a June Pew Research poll shows nearly identical levels of concern
by Democrats and Republicans about the increasing use of AI in America.

There are, arguably, natural positions each party would be expected to take on
AI. An April House subcommittee hearing on AI trends in innovation and
competition revealed much about that equilibrium. Following the lead of the
Trump administration, Republicans cast doubt on any regulation of the AI
industry. Democrats, meanwhile, emphasized consumer protection and resisting a
concentration of corporate power. Notwithstanding the fluctuating dominance of
the corporate wing of the Democratic party and the volatile populism of Trump,
this reflects the parties' historical positions on technology.

While Republicans focus on cozying up to tech plutocrats and removing the
barriers around their business models, Democrats could revive the 2020 messaging
of candidates like Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren. They could paint an
alternative vision of the future where Big Tech companies' profits and
billionaires' wealth are taxed and redistributed to young people facing an
affordability crisis for housing, healthcare, and other essentials.

Moreover, Democrats could use the technology to demonstrably show a commitment
to participatory democracy. They could use AI-driven collaborative policymaking
tools like Decidim, Pol.Is, and Go Vocal to collect voter input on a massive
scale and align their platform to the public interest.

It's surprising how little these kinds of sensemaking tools are being adopted by
candidates and parties today. Instead of using AI to capture and learn from
constituent input, candidates more often seem to think of AI as just another
broadcast technology -- good only for getting their likeness and message in
front of people. A case in point: British Member of Parliament Mark Sewards,
presumably acting in good faith, recently attracted scorn after releasing a
vacuous AI avatar of himself to his constituents.

Where the political polarization of AI goes next will probably depend on
unpredictable future events and how partisans opportunistically seize on them. A
recent European political controversy over AI illustrates how this can happen.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, a member of the country's Moderate
party, acknowledged in an August interview that he uses AI tools to get a
"second opinion" on policy issues. The attacks from political opponents were
scathing. Kristersson had earlier this year advocated for the EU to pause its
trailblazing new law regulating AI and pulled an AI tool from his campaign
website after it was abused to generate images of him appearing to solicit an
endorsement from Hitler. Although arguably much more consequential, neither of
those stories grabbed global headlines in the way the Prime Minister's admission
that he himself uses tools like ChatGPT did.

Age dynamics may govern how AI's impacts on the midterms unfold. One of the
prevailing trends that swung the 2024 election to Trump seems to have been the
rightward migration of young voters, particularly white men. So far, YouGov's
political tracking poll does not suggest a huge shift in young voters'
Congressional voting intent since the 2022 midterms.

Embracing -- or distancing themselves from -- AI might be one way the parties
seek to wrest control of this young voting bloc. While the Pew poll revealed
that large fractions of Americans of all ages are generally concerned about AI,
younger Americans are much more likely to say they regularly interact with, and
hear a lot about, AI, and are comfortable with the level of cont

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