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|  |  | Wednesday, December 17, 2025 | |  | | Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, NY-12 is becoming a proxy war over AI rules, the labor market’s official story just got a lot less comforting, Elon Musk is learning what loyalty looks like on the record, and OpenAI is peeling off a response to Google. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Ford just hit the brakes on its EV push. The company says it’ll take a $19.5 billion hit, scrap multiple EV models, including the electric F-150 Lightning and the T3 truck, and pivot toward hybrids as demand softens. | Elon Musk is an “odd, odd duck,” according to Susie Wiles. In a Vanity Fair article, Trump’s chief of staff called him a “complete solo
actor,” an “avowed” ketamine user, and more, then blasted the story as a “hit piece.” | Musk said “less politics” — then
wrote more checks. Trump-world’s big ally, who gave $292 million during the last political cycle, is reportedly donating to GOP campaigns again, even after pledging restraint. | The closing bell could soon stop meaning “go home.” Nasdaq is pushing for a near-24/7 schedule, arguing that global investors want access
across time zones, while critics warn overnight trading can amplify price swings. | | | SPONSORED |  | Build creative, adaptable
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| | PAC TO THE FUTURE | NY-12 usually offers two guarantees: a Democratic win and a good bagel. This cycle, Assemblyman Alex Bores wants a
third — AI guardrails — and he’s running on the idea that “move fast” needs a grown-up in the room. Bores, 35, is in a crowded primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (34 years in Congress, almost as long as Bores has been alive), and Bores is pairing AI safety with a universal basic income (UBI) pitch meant to catch workers before the ground moves. “So if [AI is] producing truly untold riches, I think we need to find a way to provide some stability to the American worker, to American families,” Bores told Quartz. “And UBI is going to be
part of that solution.”
The race isn’t until June 2026, but the money showed up like it already has a calendar invite. Bores raised $1.2 million in the 24 hours after announcing his candidacy in late October, then got promptly adopted as a villain by Leading the Future, a pro-AI superPAC with a $100 million war chest that has pledged a multimillion-dollar effort to sink his campaign. The group’s first ad branded Bores an Albany bureaucrat eager to “handcuff” the AI sector and cost
New York jobs. Bores says he’ll wear it: “I take that as a badge of honor.” His bet is that voters like guardrails more than gas pedals — a Gallup poll from September found 80% of U.S. adults favor AI guardrails, even if that slows development.
Meanwhile, the thing he’s campaigning on is already a live wire in Albany. Bores was an architect of the RAISE Act, a major AI guardrails package that passed the state legislature with a robust bipartisan vote in June; Gov. Kathy Hochul has
until the end of December to sign it, veto it, or send it back for amendments. The bill would bar companies from releasing AI models that don’t meet internal safety standards or that enable dangerous criminal activity, and Bores frames that as taking the upside seriously enough to fear the downside. He also wants strings on future data centers, and he’s arguing for a federal approach in pieces, because he thinks classroom AI, deepfakes, and cyberattacks don’t belong in the same legislative blender. In the bagel district, Bores is basically
asking AI to take a number. Quartz’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig has more on how a “safe” seat turned into a stress test for AI
rules. | | | RECOMMENDED READING | The
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| | | REVISIONIST HISTORY | The delayed jobs report finally landed Tuesday, after a record-long government shutdown left the Labor Department’s fall data stuck on “read” for months. So investors and policymakers got a rare treat: one big,
consolidated reality check — right as layoffs (especially white-collar ones) have started popping up everywhere except in the “official” story. The headline? Employers added 64,000 jobs in November, the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% (the highest since September 2021), and wage growth cooled to 3.5% year over year, the weakest pace since before the pandemic.
The fine print is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because of the shutdown, the release bundled November data with belated October
figures and revisions — and those revisions weren’t exactly friendly. August payrolls were revised to a loss of 26,000 jobs, and revisions across late summer and fall subtracted 33,000 positions. Federal employment took a clear hit as deferred-resignation workers officially rolled off payrolls, contributing to a loss of roughly 100,000 federal jobs since September. Manufacturing also lost jobs in November, while gains stayed clustered in health care and service sectors — the parts of the economy people lean on even when they’re cutting
everything else.
Then, there’s the lagging pain, where the white-collar damage hides behind severance and delayed job hunting. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported more than 71,000 job cuts in November (the highest November total in three years) and hiring at its lowest in 15 years, while employers are announcing or signaling more layoffs, many tied explicitly to automation and AI. Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned last week that the BLS “birth-death” model may be overstating job
creation by 60,000 jobs a month — and markets could perversely cheer weakness anyway, because a softer labor picture strengthens the case for more rate cuts in 2026 after the Fed’s three cuts this year. For workers, though, the report lands as a cold confirmation: The data is catching up with what a lot of office workers have been living. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on the delayed jobs report that finally arrived with revisions — and consequences. | | | SPONSORED |  | Save 40% on your teams and
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