When Max Tegmark took the stage at an event Tuesday to warn of human-killer artificial intelligence chatbots, the MIT researcher introduced “a man who is not afraid of speaking truth to power.”
That man was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The 85-year-old lawmaker used the platform — the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, a bipartisan coalition of artificial intelligence “doomers” — to rail against a foe that’s long animated the leading democratic socialist: The billionaire ruling class.
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Tegmark, the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, convened the gathering in the nation’s capital at a moment when the possibility of AI’s creating an extinction event has become a leading national talking point. Just last week, a researcher at AI company Anthropic went viral online for placing the odds of AI killing “all humans” within the next decade at greater than 10%, setting into motion unprecedented calls to regulate the sector.
As Americans grow increasingly skeptical of Big Tech — and especially AI-enabled technology — the issue is cutting across left-right political divides. As such, political scientists told Straight Arrow, AI skepticism has become a salient issue for populists who use “us versus them” rhetoric to reach voters.
No clearer has that dynamic been on display than during Tuesday’s Pro-Human Assembly.
After Sanders warned that AI executives seek “more wealth and more power” at the expense of “ordinary people,” Tegmark returned to the stage to introduce the next speaker: another man “who is not afraid of speaking truth to power.”
Tegmark acknowledged the introduction was “verbatim identical” to his description of Sanders. But he couldn’t stand much further politically than Sanders.
That speaker was far-right political operative Steve Bannon, who served as a White House strategist during President Donald Trump’s first term and, as the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, helped popularize the so-called “alt right” movement while drawing criticism for promoting white nationalist and anti-immigration viewpoints.
Like Sanders, Bannon pegged the debate over AI harms to a longstanding political target: the threat of foreigners and, specifically, the “Chinese Communist Party.”
Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver, said the AI debate was primed for populist pushback — from across the political spectrum. That Sanders and Bannon spoke at the same event, he told Straight Arrow, demonstrates just how sizable the pushback has become.
“These are sort of like the populist icons within each party,” Masket said, who noted that both Sanders and Bannon have sought to appeal to working-class people, albeit through drastically different messaging.
“Bannon is arguably more responsible than almost anyone, except Trump, for where the Republican Party is today,” Masket said. Tinged with “explicit racism,” Masket said, Bannon has sought to curtail the political power of technology executives while “trying to keep a focus essentially on working-class whites within the Republican Party.”
But in staking out a position against AI, Bannon is putting himself at odds with Trump, who says concerns that AI could harm humanity are a “hoax.” In doing so, he is opening a new front in the culture wars, one with unlikely allies.
‘Gambling with our lives’
The event couldn’t have been more perfectly timed: technology researcher Jacob Coxon blew up the internet with a viral social media post last week announcing his resignation from Anthropic because tech companies were not “acting responsibly” and, in a race to create “self-improving superintelligence,” were “gambling with our lives.”
Then, Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger piled on, posting on X that the odds of AI killing “all humans” within the next decade are greater than 10%. Other AI researchers have since offered their own predictions — some as high as 70% — without pointing to specific evidence to back up their statistical conclusions.
Coxon backed out of attending the Washington event, he told Axios, because his “public profile was completely blowing up.”
But his dire warnings — which prompted industry leaders to endorse a coordinated slowdown on AI development — were echoed by pundits who warned of a threat reminiscent of science fiction.
The coalition finds itself at odds with the Trump administration, which has framed AI regulatory efforts as a win for Chinese AI development, and with Democratic Party leaders working to preserve the nation’s global leadership on AI.
The public, however, is growing increasingly skeptical of the technology industry, including data centers, Flock safety surveillance cameras and, more broadly, AI. In a Politico poll released on Wednesday, 63% of respondents said they believe AI poses at least a moderate risk of destroying humanity. Those fears were similar across age, gender and political affiliation.
Hyperpartisan culture war debates in the last few years have been largely motivated by identity politics and social issues, such as the inclusion of transgender athletes in school athletics.
But the AI backlash is different, said A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama who studies the conservative media ecosystem.
Bauer said the AI backlash is a “bread and butter” economic policy issue that touches on people’s concerns about whether they’ll be able to feed their families in the future. Both Sanders and Bannon center their political commentary on “the plight of the working class,” Bauer said.
People across the political spectrum, he said, are concerned about AI’s effects on jobs, energy costs and the environment, as well as tech firms’ political and economic influence. Among Americans’ top issues with AI are concerns about AI replacing workers. Data centers, meanwhile, are a visible effect of AI on communities across the country.
“Once you start building the infrastructure for AI in people’s communities, then they start asking questions about land use, taxation and energy costs increasing,” Bauer told Straight Arrow. Trump has embraced data centers as necessary to AI development, a reality that Bauer called a “fundamental disconnect” between the administration and many voters in the president’s base.
Bannon, who hosts the far-right War Room podcast, didn’t respond to emails from Straight Arrow seeking comment.
“Bannon sees himself first and foremost as a populist,” Bauer said. While Bannon had significant influence during Trump’s first term, he said, the president’s second administration has been more closely aligned with the technology sector, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Trump has “realized that AI and crypto and these things could be quite lucrative for him personally,” Bauer said, while Bannon finds himself more closely aligned with Trump’s base on AI than the president himself.
“Trump thinks the data centers are great, that they’re the next gift from God,” Bauer said. But “people living in rural Alabama” watching data centers popping up in their neighborhoods “don’t see any direct benefit to them” and, in fact, see them as a threat to their livelihoods.
Us vs. them
On the stage in Washington, both Sanders and Bannon presented AI as an existential threat — albeit for vastly different reasons.
Sanders called AI among “the most transformational technologies” in history with the potential to “impact the lives of every man, woman, and child.”
“Virtually all of the decisions regarding the development of AI have been made by a handful of the richest people in the world,” Sanders said, “whose chief goal is to achieve even more wealth and more power than they already have, no matter what the impact their work has on ordinary people.”
For Bannon, meanwhile, nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric has long been central to his populist appeal. Such remains true in his crusade against AI. Much of his speech focused on China, including calls for a “quarantine” on the country’s AI ecosystem.
“No chips, no black marketing chips, no free ride off American technology, no steal on American tech,” Bannon said, advocating to isolate the company’s tech sector. “To hell with the Chinese Communist Party.”
But ultimately, anti-AI sentiment — and the speeches by both Sanders and Bannon — ”captures a number of things that populists really gravitated toward,” the University of Denver’s Masket said. In a recent edition of his newsletter The Smotus Report, Masket noted that populist movements across the political spectrum have long relied on a few key characteristics. Populists tend to leverage us-versus-them grievances and conspiratorial worldviews that pit “shady and untrustworthy” elites against working-class people. Then, Masket wrote, they offer “a relatively simple ‘solution.’”
Masket compared anti-AI backlash to other populist movements from both ends of the political spectrum, including QAnon on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. Adherents of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory movement, claimed the Trump administration was waging war against a secret cabal of Satan-worshiping elites who run a global child sex trafficking ring.
On the left, Masket said, the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011 to protest economic inequality and corporate greed.
While Occupy Wall Street was largely a left-wing movement, Bauer said, protesters’ rallying cry — ”we are the 99%” — similarly sought to build a bipartisan coalition pitting the working class against corporate America. As technology firms portray rapid AI development as an inevitability, he said, a broad coalition makes strategic sense.
Whether the anti-AI tent is big enough to house both Sanders and Bannon remains unclear. In an interview with CBS News, Sanders acknowledged that both he and Bannon understand that “at the grassroots level of this country” people are “deeply concerned about almost every aspect of AI.”
Bannon also addressed the unlikely union with Sanders, noting during his speech that people would be hard pressed to “find any two harder partisans.” But on AI, he said, they’ve both come to the same conclusion: “We can never trust what an oligarch says.”
Aligning with Bannon, Masket said, carries risks for Sanders, who may alienate parts of his base.
“The recent history of bipartisan movements is not promising; we’ve seen stuff that looks bipartisan very quickly fall into partisan camps,” Masket said. “And this could well be an example of that, particularly since Donald Trump seems to be very much opposed to where Steve Bannon is right now on this.”
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