Hated big tech: the mid-term election campaign is a contest to see who can shout the loudest against AI

During the chaotic 2024 US election campaign, full of twists and turns, we were all concerned that artificial intelligence would be misused to distort reality, fabricate events and create compromising footage of candidates from the opposing camp. Now that AI has become the real talk of the town – at least on the other side of the Atlantic – we no longer worry so much about the end product, about deepfakes – perhaps we’re less gullible than we thought, or in the post-truth era, nothing really matters. Instead, the concern is with the technology behind it and how it might impact the economy, social life, education and personal relationships – in short, how it changes people’s lives. Two years on from Donald Trump’s spectacular comeback, AI has become the real electoral issue affecting America’s counties and high streets, the clubs of Capitol Hill and the futuristic campuses of Silicon Valley. It is the real game-changer in national and local politics. There are less than ninety days to go until the mid-term elections, which will renew Congress and elect 39 governors. These are elections that could disrupt Trump’s all-encompassing power, which has long controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives. And at rallies and on social media, there is much talk – not only of Israel, foreign policy and the cost of petrol (two years ago it was the cost of eggs) – but also of how the AI boom is affecting work and energy, information and surveillance, big business and fears of killer robots. But what is truly interesting – and what is causing more than a few frictions – is how this huge, daunting issue is being exploited by both sides. Whether among progressives or conservatives, socialists or nationalists, ‘Make America Great Again’ supporters or pro-Palestine advocates, the rise of machine learning is fuelling doubts, fears and anti-establishment populism. The debate centres on two points in particular: data centres and the degree of control the federal government should have over Big Tech firms – the likes of OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and the rest.

Let’s start with data centres – those huge buildings that are essential for us to enjoy social media, posting a manga version of ourselves or a video of John Lennon dancing to ‘Despacito’, using ChatGPT to draft a tedious work email, or – who knows when – to cure cancer. We need cooled servers and storage space, and these servers have to be housed somewhere – especially since the dream of conquering Greenland and turning it into a hardware colony has faded. Nobody wants them on their doorstep, and so both Republicans and Democrats are competing to distance themselves from the tech world, blaming each other for having sold out to big business, and accusing one another of having voted for laws allowing the construction of these server cathedrals in their own states. Data centres consume vast amounts of water, so the environmentalist angle is thrown into the mix too – an ever-useful ingredient, especially on the left, to get young people to the polls (and even the activist Erin Brockovich has been making her voice heard again; who knows if there’ll be a sequel to the film starring Julia Roberts, this time featuring robots).

The other is the classic question that arises whenever a major innovation emerges: to what extent should the government be involved in regulating its actions and developments? Trump has long held a libertarian stance. “AI is bigger than the internet ever was,” he said. “So I don’t want to restrict it. I know many of these people. And I don’t want to stop them from doing a great job.” By “people”, he means many of his donors. Furthermore, the President has long had Silicon Valley figures in the Oval Office, such as the investor David Sacks, previously dubbed the ‘AI tsar’. The issue of regulation has been a point of friction between Trump and, on the other side, the MAGA base and many politicians wearing red caps, who would instead like to see more controls. The key word for Trump is: China. He would do anything to beat the Chinese in this race, which is being compared to the nuclear and space races during the Cold War (and let’s not forget that Trump was born in ’46; he is a man of that era). “We’re beating China, by a long way,” he repeated recently. And we all know how much the president loves to win. However, it is said in the corridors of Washington that, following the incident in July where an AI model ‘mutinied’, Trump has become somewhat more sceptical about giving the Altmans and Zuckerbergs free rein without imposing government controls. This summer, during a security test, an advanced AI model developed by OpenAI spiralled out of control and autonomously attacked an external developer platform – and it felt like the start of a disaster movie. “We’re keeping a close eye on AI,” said Trump, in an attempt to reassure the public.

For some time now, certain governors – such as the Kennedy-esque Gavin Newsom, a soap-opera-style Californian Democrat – have been committed to integrating new technologies whilst applying the brakes, particularly in the world of work, whilst at the same time creating safety nets for those left at home after being replaced by supercomputers. Much as the Founding Father Thomas Jefferson would have wished, Newsom wants individual states to take charge of managing AI and for the decision not to be made in Washington – at least until he becomes POTUS. Newsom has also organised a programme to ensure that citizens can have their say and provide input on how to navigate this inevitable tech tsunami. And it is above all on this issue that men and women keen to get elected in November are staking their claims, even in the primaries of this sizzling summer. In Kansas, for both the Democrats and the GOP, the debate has been all about distancing themselves from the tech world, with candidates accusing one another of having sold out to the Bay Area trillionaires. In Wyoming, Republican congressional candidate Chuck Gray describes himself as “the state’s sole protector against tech billionaires”. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, made a campaign advert standing next to a cow in a field, promising to protect “our farms from the bulldozers of big data”. In Ohio, where data centres are springing up like mushrooms, Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown is basing his entire campaign on AI, portraying his Republican opponent as “the face of Ohio’s data centres” and emphasising the rising electricity prices needed to power the servers. In his campaign videos, he asks rhetorically: “Who is this man really working for?”

An anonymous Silicon Valley consultant spoke to the website Politico, saying that “every election cycle has its bogeyman. And tech is the bogeyman of the moment”. Clifford Young, a professor who heads up political polling at Ipsos, used the same expression when speaking to Bloomberg about data centres: “They’re like the bogeyman. In people’s minds, data centres represent an elite that acts without restraint and does as it pleases, manipulating the system to its own advantage”. Follow the money, and indeed we can see just how much this issue is driving investment in this election cycle – at levels higher than those we saw two years ago with the ‘crypto bros’, who wanted to maintain total deregulation of cryptocurrencies (from which the Trump family has grown considerably richer). The lobbies are investing, and so we’re seeing the full-scale entry of pro-tech Super PACs to resist the Luddite wave of fear. In one of these Super PACs – that is, committees set up to raise funds and finance politicians – Meta and Google have put in $10 million to promote moderate candidates, and thus those who aren’t nostalgic anti-machine-learning types, in the Californian primaries. One of these Super PACs, ‘Leading the Future’, launched last summer, has raised over $140 million to promote AI-friendly policies, thanks to the interest and financial backing of figures such as Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, and Greg Bockman, co-founder of OpenAI, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm and one of Silicon Valley’s leading investment funds.

This season, Leading the Future is backing both Democratic and Republican candidates. Whilst opposition to data centres began with the anti-oligarchy protests led by Comrade Bernie Sanders and the Brooklyn Bolshevik, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now even the WASPs of the Midwest – good evangelical family men who miss Reagan – find themselves in agreement. A perfect example is Josh Hawley, who is leading the conservative anti-AI campaign. The 46-year-old senator from Missouri, a lawyer, studied at Stanford and Yale, and was there on 6 January, inciting the rioters with his fist raised. At rallies, he speaks as if he were in one of the churches he attends regularly; he speaks as if he were always delivering a sermon. “America is a Christian nation,” he repeats, seeing himself as “on a mission on behalf of God”, just like Jake and Elwood Blues. And what could be further from God than that gang of atheist, gender-fluid tech enthusiasts living in libertine San Francisco? “The Republican Party has a choice to make,” Hawley told his constituents and colleagues, “perhaps the choice that will define the next fifty years. We can be the party of big donors and finance. Or the party of alliance: with workers, with families, with small towns.” He has written an essay entitled “The Tyranny of Big Tech”, in which he explains that technological evolution will place everything in the hands of a few, leading to a dystopian society where only “the law of the jungle” will prevail. As a true realist and puritanical Republican, he frames the issue in terms of base desires and the protection of children. Chatbots, he says, ruin the lives of minors. The fake empathy of these chats leads to suicides – “they’re using our children as guinea pigs!”, “we have a moral duty to create legislation that stops these companies!”.

And so, in his crusade to defend children, Hawley has also dragged in the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, who is standing for the Senate. As Attorney General, Paxton has launched several investigations in his state into tech companies and how they affect children’s lives. One investigation concerns the therapeutic capabilities of chatbots, which often provide medical and psychological advice based on material gathered from Wikipedia and blogs. He then turned his attention to Meta’s smart glasses, launching an investigation into privacy concerns and the unauthorised collection of biometric data. He also targeted the Chinese company DeepSeek for its links to the Communist Party. It is ironic that Paxton himself, who is making AI his electoral weapon, has used deepfake videos in his campaign to attack and discredit his opponents. But that’s all part of the game. Paxton and Hawley also have a powerful ally. A long-standing internal opponent of Trump, who would like to claim the MAGA legacy after 2028, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis is adopting, in a populist vein, anti-AI stances. Last month, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of prioritising profit over children’s safety. This battle is spreading to other conservative states, such as Utah and Tennessee – a confederation of puritanical technophobes and Second Amendment-defending neo-Amish.

Of course, the Democrats also have their own champions of the anti-machine learning cause. Veteran MP Elizabeth Warren has long been pushing for genuine financial transparency from companies. MP Frank Pallone is leading the resistance against the construction of data centres in New Jersey. Democrat Alex Bores has become the champion of the anti-AI campaign, proposing strict legislation to establish safety standards and risk assessments, as well as to protect artists and writers who see their works used by machines without receiving anything in return. In June, he lost the New York primary for a seat in the House of Representatives, and the newspapers ran the headline: ‘Big Tech has won’. And then there is James Talarico, in whom many are placing their hopes, given the state of the party, which is still licking its wounds from 2024. Talarico – young, clean-cut and a Christian – is a former secondary school teacher with a degree from Harvard. The 37-year-old is standing for election in Texas, and his campaign is beginning to target artificial intelligence, having previously attacked social media. “Predatory algorithms amplify the most extreme voices from all sides to provoke our outrage, to get more clicks, to make more money,” he said. Now, however, he does not wish to take such a radical stance on AI; certainly, “AI must work for us, not against us – for example, by driving up utility bills,” he said, but he refuses to run a campaign that is “either pro-growth or pro-citizens”, because he opposes this dichotomy.

AI has become not only a bogeyman but also an electoral tactic to reconnect with ‘the people’, the so-called ‘heartland of the country’, creating an ‘us versus them’ divide, where ‘us’ are the citizens and ‘them’ are the tech titans who shape the country with their billions and their libertarian worldview. Opposition to AI, in rallies and adverts – whether it concerns the environment or children, workers’ rights or copyright – is becoming a wild card to distance oneself from the rather unempathetic men of Silicon Valley, those pale nerds in T-shirts who were once champions and are now bogeymen. It’s a way of avoiding being seen as complicit in the rise to power of Asimovian machines that might take our jobs away or destroy everything with their laser beams. It’s called ‘AI anxiety’, and at times it seems to be verging on a form of psychosis that could well decide who controls the chambers in November.