{"id":56328,"date":"2026-05-30T18:14:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/56328\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T18:14:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:14:53","slug":"artificial-intelligence-is-brought-to-you-by-these-florida-lobbyists-and-political-associations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/56328\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence is brought to you by these Florida lobbyists and political associations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence might one day replace humanity, lead us to a post-scarcity utopia, or just turn into a more annoying version of Clippy. And who knows, maybe Clippy will get a\u00a0high-tech come<\/a>back with access to nuclear launch codes.<\/p>\n

For now, though, AI still needs lobbyists.<\/p>\n

And Florida\u2019s political scene is already full of them.<\/p>\n

Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI are all shaping the global AI race. They have quietly built strong teams in Tallahassee as lawmakers deal with\u00a0procurement rules<\/a>,\u00a0datacenter growth<\/a>, education policy, energy needs, and even the question of whether machines might one day see humans as unnecessary middle managers.<\/p>\n

OpenAI<\/a> \u2014 the company that launched a thousand panicked LinkedIn posts and at least three divorces via ChatGPT \u2014 is represented in Florida by The Advocacy Partners\u2019<\/a> Sarah Suskey and Slater Bayliss, alongside The Southern Group<\/a> team of Brian Bautista, Brian McManus, Chris Dudley, and Clark Smith.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anthropic<\/a>, which created Claude and is known for its strong focus on AI safety, has hired\u00a0Capital City Consulting. Their team<\/a>\u00a0includes co-founder\u00a0Nick Iarossi,\u00a0Caroline Frasier,\u00a0Chris Schoonover,\u00a0and\u00a0Kaley Flynn.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0xAI<\/a>, which made Grok and shows that every billionaire eventually wants a chatbot based on their own online posts. Add in Tesla, and Musk is now closer than anyone to creating a real-life Knight Rider universe. Hopefully, the result is more like\u00a0KITT<\/a>\u00a0or Red Dwarf\u2019s\u00a0Holly,<\/a>\u00a0and less like\u00a0HAL 9000<\/a> on a wild streak.<\/p>\n

In Florida, xAI is represented by\u00a0Jeff Sharkey\u00a0of\u00a0Capitol Alliance Group<\/a>, along with\u00a0Taylor Biehl, who have both worked with Musk\u2019s companies for a long time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Naturally, the hyperscalers arrived too.<\/p>\n

Google<\/a> \u2014 inventor of the transformer architecture<\/a> that made the current AI boom possible and owner of enough of the internet to make William Gibson<\/a> retroactively uncomfortable \u2014 fields one of the deepest Tallahassee benches in the game.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That roster includes in-house advocates Amanda Ball, Joseph Dooley, Leah Popoff, and Taylor Ferguson, alongside Claudia Davant of Adams St. Advocates<\/a>, Chris Moya of Jones Walker<\/a>, Cissy Proctor of LSN Partners<\/a> and Bill Rubin and Heather Turnbull of Rubin Turnbull & Associates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Microsoft<\/a>, on the other hand, has handled the AI era much like Rome handled its neighbors. If taking over completely is tough, forming a\u00a0strategic partnership<\/a> is just as good.<\/p>\n

Microsoft\u2019s\u00a0multibillion-dollar partnership<\/a>\u00a0with OpenAI has made Copilot one of the most widely used (and sometimes disliked) AI products in the world. Meanwhile,\u00a0Azure<\/a> now hosts a huge share of global AI computing power.<\/p>\n

In Florida, Microsoft works with Lisa Aaron Consulting,\u00a0Metz Husband & Daughton,<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0SBM Partners.<\/a>\u00a0Together, their team is so large that even\u00a0Cortana<\/a> might feel left out.<\/p>\n

Meta Platforms<\/a>, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and the\u00a0Llama AI models<\/a>, has also built a strong presence in the Capitol by hiring\u00a0Ballard Partners<\/a>\u00a0and the always top-ranked\u00a0GrayRobinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Their team features Brian Ballard, the top national lobbyist, along with\u00a0Adrian Lukis and\u00a0Scott Wagner at Ballard Partners. At GrayRobinson, former Speaker and firm President\u00a0Dean Cannon, Chris Carmody, Carlecia Collins, Jason Unger,\u00a0and\u00a0Joseph Salzverg\u00a0are on board. In-house advocate\u00a0Theresa Robertson is also part of the group.<\/p>\n

And yes, Apple<\/a> is here too.<\/p>\n

The Cupertino giant\u2019s AI rollout has occasionally felt less like the launch of a revolutionary platform and more like watching the world\u2019s richest company repeatedly insist Siri is about to cook any day now. However, Apple Intelligence still places the company squarely in the middle of the modern AI race.<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s team in Tallahassee works with The Southern Group, including founding partner\u00a0Paul Mitchell, Bautista, Dudley,\u00a0Rachel Cone,\u00a0Erin Rock,\u00a0Nicole Kelly, Smith, and enough other lobbyists to fill a strong SEC defensive lineup.<\/p>\n

Of course, none of this computing comes cheap.<\/p>\n

The AI boom has started a race for datacenters, electricity, and cooling systems. This demand is so big that utility companies have become key players in the future of AI.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Florida Power & Light<\/a>, Duke Energy<\/a>, and TECO<\/a> all maintain massive lobbying presences in Tallahassee as lawmakers debate datacenter siting, energy load growth and infrastructure expansion tied to hyperscale development.<\/p>\n

In short, the future of AI might depend on GPUs, but it still needs people to sign off on new substations.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a related trend: prediction markets. Long before ChatGPT, Claude, or Kalshi,\u00a0Isaac Asimov imagined Multivac, a supercomputer so advanced it could predict election results by interviewing just one randomly chosen American voter.<\/p>\n

Seventy years later, Silicon Valley saw that idea and decided to turn it into a business.<\/p>\n

Kalshi<\/a> \u2014 the federally regulated prediction-market platform now involved in several legal and regulatory battles over event contracts \u2014 is represented in Florida by Capital City Consulting.<\/p>\n

Sportsbooks and fantasy sports companies have also built up their teams.<\/p>\n

DraftKings<\/a> retained McGuireWoods Consulting<\/a>, SBM Partners and Technology Advocates. FanDuel<\/a> and BetMGM<\/a> both retained Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe<\/a>. PrizePicks<\/a> brought in Capital City Consulting, Oak Strategies<\/a> and Rubin Turnbull & Associates.<\/p>\n

Even Seminole Hard Rock Digital, the Seminole Tribe\u2019s online gaming division, works with Ballard Partners and\u00a0PooleMcKinley<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Naturally, pop culture has been warning us about these issues for decades.<\/p>\n

HAL 9000 calmly killed astronauts while saying everything was \u201ccompletely operational.\u201d Skynet started the apocalypse. SHODAN made a god complex into an operating system. GlaDOS turned workplace testing into psychological warfare.<\/p>\n

But fiction also gave us helpful AI characters like Data, Baymax, WALL-E, KITT, and the Star Trek tradition of robots who just wanted to help people be a little better.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, many of those positive AI stories are now owned by\u00a0Disney,<\/a> thanks to its many acquisitions over the past twenty years. The company has enough AI-themed stories to create a whole \u2018please don\u2019t fear the machines\u2019 movie universe.<\/p>\n

No one really knows what the future of AI will look like. For now, Tallahassee\u2019s lobbyists will keep helping big industries work with the government, while lawmakers try to figure out if they\u2019re shaping the future, chasing it, or just feeding it more paperwork.<\/p>\n

And if the machines ever do become self-aware, at least they\u2019ll know exactly who to hire at the Capitol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence might one day replace humanity, lead us to a post-scarcity utopia, or just turn into a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[32797,32798,24,32799,53,25,32800,32801,32802,32803,32804,32805,32806,32807,32808,32809,32810,32811,32812,32813,32814,32815,132,32816,32817,32818,32819,32820,32821,32822,32823,32824,32825,32826,32827,32828,1122,32829,320,32830,157,32831,32832,32833,32834,32835,32836,32837,32838,32839,32840,32841,32842],"class_list":["post-56328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-adams-st-advocates","tag-adrian-lukis","tag-ai","tag-amanda-ball","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-ballard-partners","tag-bill-rubin","tag-brian-ballard","tag-brian-bautista","tag-brian-mcmanus","tag-capital-city-consulting","tag-capitol-alliance-group","tag-caroline-frasier","tag-chris-dudley","tag-chris-moya","tag-chris-schoonover","tag-cissy-proctor","tag-clark-smith","tag-claudia-davant","tag-corcoran-partners","tag-dean-cannon","tag-google","tag-grayrobinson","tag-heather-turnbull","tag-jason-unger","tag-jeff-sharkey","tag-joe-salzverg-at-grayrobinson","tag-johnson-blanton","tag-jones-walker","tag-joseph-dooley","tag-kaley-flynn","tag-leah-popoff","tag-liberty-partners-of-tallahassee","tag-lisa-aaron-consulting","tag-lsn-partners","tag-meta","tag-metz-husband-daughton","tag-microsoft","tag-nick-iarossi","tag-openai","tag-poolemckinley","tag-rubin-turnbull-associates","tag-sarah-suskey","tag-sbm-partners","tag-scott-wagner","tag-slater-bayliss","tag-taylor-biehl","tag-taylor-ferguson","tag-the-advocacy-partners","tag-the-southern-group","tag-theresa-robertson","tag-tripp-scott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}