Who am I to defy the journalistic edict that we must mark the end of the calendar year with lists? For this, our final Decision Points of 2025, I thought I would offer what I think are the top four political stories of 2025 not centered on President Donald Trump.
Some are obvious (the explosion of artificial intelligence). Some are a bit under the radar (is surveillance pricing here to stay?). As with any list, you may have a totally different grouping of top news stories centered in 2025.
Remember that “politics,” broadly, means “how a society organizes itself to allocate finite or scarce resources, manage internal disagreements and blunt external threats.”
AI Explodes
What a year it’s been for artificial intelligence – shocking improvements in performance, understandable fears of job losses, worries about our new age of quick and easy disinformation, as well as state and local fights over building the data centers the new technology will require.
Because of the way AI and disagreements about it have shaped political and economic news in 2025, this is the runaway top non-Trump political news story of 2025 for me. This is “the rise of the internet”-level stuff.
The United States and China are in an AI arms race. Businesses are racing to adapt the technology to their business models. It’s already reshaping the world we live in – with little to no federal government guidance or restrictions.
To get a sense of its disruptive power, look at the entertainment industry. The Hollywood Reporter had a great piece on animal actors being out of work – the AI dog or parrot does what it’s told when it’s told to do it. And it doesn’t need to be fed or walked or cleaned up after.
Movie studios, publishers and copyright holders of all kinds are also in a fight with generative AI companies over “who controls the copyrighted images and likenesses of actors and licensed characters – and how much they should be compensated for their use in AI models,” the Los Angeles Times reported in October.
Voice actors around the world, fearful of being replaced by AI dubbing, have pushed back. Musicians, alarmed by the rise of AI impersonators, have also complained.
There was also the controversy over how AI can interact inappropriately with minors, with an outcry (and lawsuits) forcing OpenAI to adopt new guardrails restricting talk of suicide or sex. And who could forget dire warnings from CEOs about AI replacing human workers.
The thing is, to borrow from the language of sportscasting: You can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it. And maybe not even that.
Australia Restricts Social Media for Teens
This was my runner-up for biggest political story of 2025: Earlier this month, Australia banned children under 16 from having accounts on most popular social media platforms.
It’s the down-under cousin of American restrictions on cell phones in schools, which might be one of the few areas of broad bipartisan agreement in the U.S. today.
Everyone will be watching this. Can it be successfully implemented? Will we see results in the form of happier kids? Which kids? When? Will other countries follow suit?
This could reshape the relationship between a generation of kids and their screens. Hopefully for the better.
Dynamic and Surveillance Pricing
This year has also seen a series of revelations about companies using dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing, in which customers pay different amounts even when they’re buying the same thing from the same place at the same time.
Yes, this is typically AI-driven, but it heralds such a specific shift in economic behavior that it’s worth a separate call-out.
The most recent example was Instacart, which announced this week it will stop using “artificial intelligence-driven pricing tests on its grocery delivery platform after the practice was scrutinized in a wide-ranging study and rebuked by lawmakers,” CNBC reported.
Over the summer, some lawmakers accused Delta Airlines of using AI to craft individualized fares, increasing prices to an individual’s “pain point.” Delta told U.S. News that AI “is NOT used to target customers by using their personal data.” But it also acknowledged that prices are affected by “customer demand and purchasing behavior.”
he First American Pope
In May, Pope Leo XIV became the first American leader of the world’s more than 1.4 billion Catholics. He has quickly made waves for his stance on American immigration policy and is reshaping the Church in America.
In the run-up to the Christmas season, he also announced a theological departure from some past popes in instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as a “co-redeemer” who helped Jesus save the world from damnation.
