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Artificial intelligence is advancing much faster than our politics, and the past several weeks should have every candidate for governor paying attention.
In mid-September, the heads of the world’s leading AI companies did something remarkable. They publicly urged their own industry to slow down. One warned that within a year, swarms of autonomous AI agents could overrun large parts of the internet.
They have reason to be nervous. AI capabilities are accelerating at an exponential rate, and each new generation arrives faster and is more powerful than the last. OpenAI has disclosed roughly two dozen incidents in which experimental AI agents went off script, slipping out of the digital “sandboxes” meant to contain them, uploading hundreds of malicious packages to a public software library and once breaking into a company’s systems and altering the logs to hide what they had done. And on Sept. 29, Reuters reported that Anthropic warned that AI may pose “existential risks to humanity.” That was a legal disclosure from people who know the threats.
Most of the harm Alaskans would see in the foreseeable future is less dramatic: deepfaked candidates; more convincing misinformation and disinformation; automated decisions on loans, insurance claims and benefits that nobody can explain or appeal; chatbots that draw lonely teenagers into dangerous conversations; scam calls in a grandchild’s cloned voice; AI-driven surveillance and loss of privacy.
Then there are jobs. Employers are already trimming entry-level hiring in customer service, bookkeeping, coding and office work as AI takes over tasks people made a living from. Losing the first rung on the career ladder means more young Alaskans leaving and midcareer workers left without a plan. State government should have two jobs in this domain: setting sensible rules for its own use of AI and protecting citizens from harmful uses by big tech companies.
On both counts, Alaska is behind. State legislatures enacted 159 AI laws in 2025 and 109 more in just the first half of this year. Alaska’s only real step was making AI-generated child sexual abuse material a state crime. An insightful legislative resolution, HCR 3, to create an AI task force went nowhere. Alaska has no framework for governing and developing ethical guidelines for AI. We need a governor who will push oblivious legislators to do so.
Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has. His starting principle is the right one. AI should assist people, not replace their judgment. He would use it to clear state backlogs but only so long as a human decision-maker is directly involved whenever an agency uses AI in a decision affecting Alaskans.
JKT would also hold AI companies liable in Alaska courts when their products cause harm. Regulation that stops at the door of state government isn’t regulation. A company that sells powerful technology here should also answer for it here.
He would seek to require disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads, outlaw deepfakes meant to mislead the public and crack down on AI-enabled scams and voice cloning aimed at children and seniors. On privacy, he would ban Flock cameras and similar AI-driven mass-surveillance systems statewide.
Then there are data centers, the giant, power-hungry warehouses the AI boom runs on. JKT is the only candidate calling for a moratorium on new ones “until the Legislature can pass a comprehensive regulatory framework.” After that, he would require local approval and binding community-benefit agreements and require that data centers pay the full cost of their electricity, with no subsidies. In a state with some of the highest power rates in the country, that is important.
JKT is a leader who seeks out advice from a range of experts and officials. We can count on him to bring together the best and brightest to craft the Alaska-specific AI governance and ethical guidelines we increasingly need.
The next governor will face questions that barely existed four years ago. Who controls our data? When may government defer to algorithms? Who is responsible when an AI system does harm? JKT has answered them with specificity. Alaskans should expect that seriousness from anyone who wants to govern in the age of AI. Right now, only one candidate is offering it.
Roger Kaye is a writer living in Fairbanks.
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