Jay Carney’s new job: Rebuild tech’s bridge to Democrats

This is an excerpt from the September 14, 2026 DealBook Newsletter from the New York Times.

Jay Carney is heading back to Silicon Valley’s political trenches. Carney, the former Obama press secretary who left Airbnb this summer, has joined SV Angel, Ron Conway’s early-stage venture capital firm, to run a new initiative called Project Blueprint.

Its purpose is to rebuild bonds between leaders in the artificial intelligence sector and Democrats who are demanding new rules to regulate the technology.

Timing is key as Democrats may get their chance to do just that after the midterm elections in November.

“Much of the technology industry has shifted to the political right, leaving a vacuum between technology leaders and Democrats,” SV Angel said in a memo read by DealBook. With a divided government likely after the midterms, “there needs to be a trusted bridge between the people building A.I. and the Democrats who will help write the rules governing it. Without one, both sides are worse off.”

The TL;DR: The memo says that A.I.’s critics are right about a lot — that systems now have “real offensive cyber capability”; that safeguards for children “are not adequate”; that job displacement is a true threat; and that community backlash against data centers over power bills and water “is real and growing.”

The growing public skepticism is “a failure of the industry’s making,” it adds.

Conway has had one of Silicon Valley’s most reliable Democratic checkbooks. He was among the donors who helped push former President Joe Biden to step aside after a disastrous June 2024 debate, and he backed Kamala Harris soon after.

Carney’s ties to Washington and tech run deep. He was the White House press secretary from 2011 to 2014 before holding top policy and communications roles at Amazon and Airbnb. “A.I.’s potential for good is enormous,” Carney told DealBook. “But as we’ve seen just this week, the risks and downsides are real and need to be managed.”