On March 25, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act: a proposal for an immediate federal moratorium on all new data centers until stringent national constraints on artificial intelligence are adopted. “We cannot stand by while a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy, and the future of humanity,” Sanders said, who a few days earlier had published on his YouTube channel a video of his dialogue with Anthropic’s Claude model on the risks of artificial intelligence, which has reached over 3.4 million views.
The moratorium certainly does not have the numbers in Congress to be approved, but it is also in light of this perspective that the announcement on April 2 of OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN — Technology Business Programming Network — can be read, a livestreaming program on technology and finance hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, two former startup founders.
At this stage of 2026, the public and political significance of artificial intelligence is increasingly evident, which I recalled on January 2 in reference to Google’s narrative offensive (meanwhile the documentary “The Thinking Game” has surpassed 440 million views and “The Infinity Machine,” Sebastian Mallaby’s book on Demis Hassabis, has been published).
And to understand the strategic value of TBPN, it is useful to highlight the structural and epochal transformation that has affected the world of technological communication in the United States over the last decade.
There is now no U.S. television program that serves as a point of reference or creates even a minimum of debate or interest on what drives the U.S. economy: technology. Instead, there is a galaxy of podcasts that has already changed the rules of the game. The migration from traditional media to podcasts, which can be more or less independent, more or less subjects and objects of influence, has already taken place. In the last two years, this has sharply accelerated.
All-In, hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, has emerged as the most influential Trumpian podcast, since it also featured the “czar of artificial intelligence” (Sacks) who organized the Winning the AI Race Summit in 2025 in Washington D.C., together with the Hill and Valley Forum, with the participation of leading figures from the Trump administration and the president himself. Therefore, there is no longer, nor will there ever be, a clear boundary between podcasts and policy.
Dwarkesh Patel embodies a different but complementary figure: grown from nothing to a privileged interlocutor of Silicon Valley, he has steadily multiplied his audience, ranging from figures like Zuckerberg to Nadella to personalities like Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy, has invited guests who also talk about war strategy and the Renaissance, and has published The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 — a book built on the podcast method as an oral history of technological thought. The podcasts of Lex Fridman and Acquired, hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, linked to the in-depth analysis of business models of major tech companies and sponsored by J.P. Morgan, also retain great importance.
Since YouTube is already the planet’s leading media and since the podcast deep-dive model can never be fully replicated by television programs, the influence of this ecosystem, while undergoing changes and adjustments, can only grow. Tech companies — endowed with enormous resources — will continue to want to be inside their conversations and to lead them, and will continue to pay for sponsorships and to feel comfortable. The personalities of this media ecosystem will be increasingly paid and sought after. For example, the latest edition of NVIDIA’s main conference, GTC 2026, already featured Tiffany Janzen, comfortable in discussions with specialized companies like Vertiv and Schneider Electric.
In this varied ecosystem, TBPN has a model that is not linked to in-depth interviews with a single guest but to the proposal of livestreaming content of about three hours with a daily cadence, which is then also presented in a condensed version. Although its viewers are not many compared to other podcasts, TBPN has already occupied its own niche, attracting considerable advertising revenue. With OpenAI’s acquisition, TBPN will report directly to Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane (a highly experienced political consultant) and the advertising business will be discontinued. The two hosts will contribute to OpenAI’s communication and marketing activities while maintaining full independence in guest selection and editorial choices.
Obviously, with the cessation of the advertising business, TBPN will no longer have to attract sponsorships from OpenAI’s competitors, as it did with Gemini, for example. It will become an internal unit within the company’s strategy and institutional relations organization and will be engaged in what we can call a “double narrative war.” Against competitors, certainly, because everyone wants to make money at the expense of others (especially those with valuations and commitments like OpenAI). But also against the political line represented by Sanders, who wants to exploit the objective unpopularity of artificial intelligence in the United States and who will continue to gain support on this issue. Despite the enormous resources that will be invested and the galaxy of podcasts and influencers that will try to explain otherwise.
