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Bloomberg Invest: Hudson River Trading's Iain Dunning on AI Upskilling
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March 3, 2026
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9:51Now PlayingIain Dunning, Hudson River Trading Head of AI, discusses how the firm is using AI to look for and generate alpha, upskill workers, improve effiency, and more. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Tim Stenovec and Carol Massar from the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York City. Disrupting jobs, fueling a data center boom, even killing off this em dash—artificial intelligence is the conversation policymakers, and the rest of us, just can’t escape.
That’s especially the case in Washington, where spending on federal AI influence hit an all-time high last year. Lobbying firms reported a record $37.2 million in earnings from AI-related influence peddling in the fourth quarter alone, a 38% jump from a year earlier, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis.
For the full year, Washington lobbyists received almost $130 million for work related to AI, as Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google led the spending blitz. Some of the biggest jumps came from frontier labs OpenAI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, two of the highest valued startups in history vying to shape the AI industry’s future and most recently engulfed in a dispute over its use within the US military.
Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, efforts to control how the tech is used, regulated, developed, sold, and exported have grown exponentially. K Street amassed nearly $300 million in revenue for AI work since the start of 2023, the quarter after ChatGPT’s release and former President Joe Bidenunveiled his administration’s “AI Bill of Rights” consumer protection framework.
“The impact that AI is going to have on the world and the United States is so big and the debate in DC is already big, but it’s only going to get bigger,” said Josh Ackil, a founder of the tech lobbying firm Franklin Square Group. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.”
Just the Beginning
K Street insiders expect that the jump is just the beginning of big spending on the issue. Battles have broken out across the country over building energy-sucking data centers needed to power the market, which could reach $4.8 trillion globally by 2033, according to a United Nations analysis.
“The ChatGPT moment was real for a lot of folks and became a focus point for everyone,” said Joel Richard, who chairs the technology practice at Invariant. “It’s more than just an issue for tech policy folks—every sector, every component of government and industry is really seeking to position themselves in Washington, either to secure advantages in the marketplace or to secure government contracts.”
AI bleeds into every industry, from energy to health care, defense to education and, of course, technology.
“There is no such thing as an AI client,” said Keenan Austin Reed, CEO of the Alpine Group where clients include Palantir Technologies Inc., Whoop Inc., and the Recording Industry Association of America. “Every client has AI embedded now.”
“It is now the ultimate multidisciplinary issue,” said Alex Vogel, founder of the Vogel Group, whose clients include NVIDIA Corp., the chip-maker and now most valuable public company in the world with a market cap on Monday of $4.4 trillion. When it comes to building the new data centers, he said, “It is hand-to-hand combat on actually getting these projects up and running.”
Big Tech has paid mightily to maintain close ties to President Donald Trump’s White House, which has so far employed a hands-off approach to regulating the AI sector. The administration has voided Biden-era safety restrictions, moved to preempt state AI laws, approved the sale of sophisticated AI chips to China, and aligned itself with Silicon Valley investors eager to accelerate America’s push to win the so-called AI race.
“Because AI is a historical general-purpose technology that scales human capabilities and will impact all walks of life—akin to the printing press, combustion engine, electricity, the transistor—everyone should care about AI policy,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said in a text message.
Expanding Influence
Tech giants’ AI influence spending also reaches far beyond K Street.
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