Pelosi blasts AI chatbot over San Francisco race

Nancy Pelosi’s AI chatbot fight boiled over in the San Francisco race this week after California state Sen. Scott Wiener launched a parody site aimed at Connie Chan, the city supervisor Pelosi has endorsed to replace her in Congress. The AI chatbot drew a sharp public rebuke from Pelosi before Wiener shut it down Friday, saying the stunt had become a distraction from the campaign itself.

Wiener rolled out ConnieChan.ai as a mockup of Chan, describing it as the world’s first AI built to say no to anything a user asks. The site was meant to needle Chan’s reputation among critics as a progressive NIMBY and to attack her record on housing proposals. Chan’s campaign was predictably unhappy with the tactic, and Pelosi soon followed with her own condemnation. In a statement backed by several female elected officials, Pelosi said women have spent generations fighting to have their own voices heard and should not now have to fight against artificial intelligence putting words in their mouths.

Pelosi’s statement accused Wiener of using AI to imitate a female voice, calling it a misuse of technology that reflects a troubling willingness to erase women’s agency. The statement also said the impact is worse because Chan is a non-white woman, arguing that racial stereotypes compound the harm. Pelosi framed the issue as more than a campaign gimmick and cast the AI chatbot as an example of how technology can be turned into a political weapon against women.

Wiener pushed back at the criticism and said the website was clearly marked as parody. He also pointed to Pelosi’s opposition to his first-in-the-nation AI safety law and dismissed her claims as baseless. He said the attack on the chatbot was classic deflection and argued that the parody reflected real weaknesses in Chan’s candidacy. Even so, the senator later took the site down and said it had pulled attention away from the issues San Franciscans actually care about.