Author: Merrel Briona

The “blue tsunami” that swept over the midterm elections made it clear that voters are sick of tech billionaires meddling in politics, opposed to data center construction, and deeply suspicious of the AI industry.

But OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar apparently didn’t get that memo. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, she vowed that OpenAI would keep pouring money into data center construction so it can please its corporate customers — voters be damned.

“When I think about the midterms, I need to keep thinking about how do we keep investing to meet that customer demand,” Friar told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in the interview. “It starts early with having built relationships with all of the hyperscalers, and it will continue to mean that we raise capital.”

While Eisen is focused on “customer demand,” she should probably start paying attention to what voters are asking for. Across 41 local ballot measures on restricting AI data centers, voters supported all but one, Ballotpedia data showed. 56 percent of Americans considered AI and data centers a crucial or major factor in how they voted, according to NBC News exit polls.

Meanwhile, Democratic challengers flipped seats in multiple states while campaigning against the data center buildout. Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa will become the first Democrat to lead the state in over three decades after promising voters to impose a moratorium on new data centers.

But all that is moot to OpenAI’s Friar — since, in her eyes, people want AI.

“The demand for AI is real,” Friar said in the interview. “I don’t think anyone’s arguing with that, or if they are, I think it’s a losing argument.”

In all, she doesn’t believe that the election drastically changes anything for the company. To her, it seems, the backlash to AI is more or less a messaging problem.

“If the midterm means more focus on data centers and communities, we’re going to keep doing the work to get into those communities and to build trust with them,” Friar said. 

She put it in more transactional terms elsewhere in the interview: “We are going to keep building out those relationships with communities so we can get the compute we need.”

If Friar’s intentions are to portray the company as unphased, it’s coming a little too late. In the wake of the elections, OpenAI moved swiftly to announce “new commitments to the communities” where it’s building data centers, which included a promise to no longer use non-disclosure agreements while discussing data center construction with government officials. 

CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, showed his poker face still needed improvement by immediately tweeting that “people should always be in control of the future.”

More on AI: Voters Supported Every Single Anti-Data Center Proposal in America, Except One

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SINGAPORE, Nov. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — DomoAI, the AI video platform used by more than 5 million creators, today announced InkoAI Agent, a creative assistant that runs the entire image and video workflow in one conversation, from a single sentence to ready-to-post content, with creators in control of every step.

One AI Video Agent, the Whole Workflow

Making an AI video usually means switching tools, rewriting prompts and re-uploading files to fix one detail. InkoAI Agent can:

• Turn a one-line idea into a finished image or clip for TikTok, YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, writing the prompt and setting format and length
• Launch DomoAI Skills in one click, including Short Drama, Anime Video, Cartoon Style and General Story, to take one idea to a finished video with dialogue or narration, approving the script, characters and shots along the way
• Show what it will generate and wait for approval, so nothing runs without the creator’s say-so
• Work across 15 image and video models, including leading models such as GPT Image 2.5, Nano Banana Pro, Seedance 2.5 and MiniMax H3, alongside DomoAI 2.5
• Read text, images, documents and library videos, from character sheets and product photos to scripts and storyboards
• Remember every result in the chat, so creators can redraw, vary or animate any earlier image without re-uploading it

Built for AI-Native Creators

• Microdrama and anime video creators: take a story from script to finished episode instead of chaining separate tools.
• Short-form video creators: keep a daily posting schedule without learning to write prompts.
• Original character (OC) creators: tweak an outfit or expression without starting over, then animate the character.
• Brand and performance marketers: turn one product photo into UGC-style ads and test-ready variations, without a shoot.

DomoAI plans to keep expanding InkoAI Agent, adding Skills for video ads from a product link or photo, tutorials and AI music videos, along with more creation capabilities. InkoAI Agent is available today at domoai.app/agent.

About DomoAI

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Singapore, DomoAI is an AI image and video creation platform used by more than 5 million creators worldwide. Learn more at domoai.app. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact
Penny
DomoAI
penny@domoai.app 

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For years, many bosses have been adamant that employees use AI at all costs — despite research suggesting there’s little to gain from it in terms of productivity, evidence that flies in the face of the tech industry’s repeated promises of a workplace revolution brought on by the tech.

But now that execs are drowning in meaningless “workslop,” they’re starting to sing a very different tune. As Business Insider reports, one CEO of a tech recruiting company suddenly found herself being inundated with Slack messages from employees that they’d clearly generated using AI, leading her to implement a new policy that strictly forbids the practice for internal communications.

She’s not the first. One anonymous CEO got so fed up, they threatened to “fire the next person” who blasted them with unedited ChatGPT slop, as Inc reported earlier this year. Instead of fundamentally reshaping white collar industries for the better, it’s finally dawning on bosses that the extensive and often counterproductive use of AI tools could be doing far more harm than good.

Case in point, in a new study published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly, a team of researchers led by Hebrew University of Jerusalem PhD student Samuel Meyers found that employees who doubled down on using tools like ChatGPT are being trusted less by their employers, actively hurting their chances of promotion.

That’s even at workplaces where the use of AI tools are still actively being encouraged, suggesting there’s a paradoxical price workers who embrace the tech are paying.

In a series of experiments, the team asked supervisors to decide whether to trust an employee’s report, while knowing whether they had used AI or not — but not basing their judgment on the quality of the work itself. Employees who didn’t use AI had a 68 percent chance of earning their trust. When they used AI, that number shrank down to just 24 percent.

“AI is changing not only how we work, but also how we judge the people we work with,” said coauthor and Hebrew University of Jerusalem senior lecturer Yochanan Bigman in a statement. “An employee may use AI to produce better work more efficiently yet still lose their manager’s trust simply because AI was involved.”

As a result, “organizations need to recognize that adopting AI is not just a technological challenge — it is also a psychological and managerial one,” Bigman added.

Beyond eroding trust, executives have also found that the use of AI agents and coding tools in particular have sent costs soaring, seriously hurting their companies’ bottom lines and often forcing them to reverse course and cut spending.

Meanwhile, researchers have yet to detect a meaningful windfall from using AI at work, making it an expensive distraction. Polls have shown that the vast majority of CEOs haven’t seen any productivity gains.

It’s a particularly unfortunate reality as the job market continues to deteriorate, with or without any AI-related productivity boost.

Employees are now stuck between a rock in a hard place: either follow their supervisors’ instructions and use AI, or earn their trust by ignoring those calls. Meyers and his colleagues worry this growing tension could give rise to “shadow AI” — undisclosed use of the tech at work, that could further hurt their career prospects.

More on work and AI: There Are Now Growing Signs That AI Is Hurting Employment in the Job Market