President Donald Trump said Sunday that “negative forces” were conjuring up “things that won’t happen,” even as warnings from leaders of artificial intelligence firms about the technology’s risks intensified a debate that could reshape American politics. He also said, “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way,” then told reporters, “I’m not downplaying, but, you know, it’s going to be more good than bad by a lot.”
That’s the language of power talking to itself. The White House, the tech bosses, Congress, and the campaign machines are all circling the same question: who gets to control a system that already reaches into jobs, utilities, data centers, and the daily costs ordinary people eat every month.
Who Pays for the Machine
The political fight has become a turning point, with AI increasingly central to the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential race. Candidates of both parties have tapped into public anger over AI infrastructure, calling for moratoriums on the vast data centers that use large amounts of power and water. An NBC News poll this month found that 70% of respondents were more worried than excited by AI.
That fear isn’t abstract. The article says the issue is tied to worries about massive job losses, higher utility bills and the perception that data centers are driving the affordability crisis, which is the No. 1 issue this election season. The people footing the bill are the ones with the least say in how the system gets built.
Hostility toward AI is also becoming a catchall for public anger and anxiety on disparate issues, including worries about billionaire tech oligarchs and the possibility that China or other non-state actors could exploit AI advances to threaten the U.S. The political environment may make AI an even more potent issue in the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, and Democrats hope to use it to push momentum for change if they win back the House or Senate.
What the Bosses Say
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote Saturday that the industry needed to be slowed down. In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, due to air in full Monday, he called on AI leaders to work together to keep the technology from harming humanity. On Saturday, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, posted on X that he agreed with Amodei and called for “independent evaluators” embedded in AI firms. Elon Musk, whose xAI company powers the chatbot Grok, wrote “Dario is right” on X. Google’s DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis also added his voice to the chorus.
All this followed a warning by AI researcher Jacob Coxon that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The people building it are now also the ones asking to be trusted to police it. That’s a familiar arrangement.
Republican inertia contrasts with growing warnings from key Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, that without a government-mandated brake on the technology, the world would cross a “dangerous” threshold. House Speaker Mike Johnson rejected a call to pass emergency legislation, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that AI executives “pushing the frontier” could slow down if they wanted, but Congress shouldn’t rush to act. Johnson and Trump both warned that slowing the U.S. AI industry would hand the advantage in the superintelligence race to China.
Regulation, Delay, and the Same Old Trap
There’s also an ideological angle to the controversy because of the Trump administration’s instinct for minimal regulation, which doesn’t distinguish between traditional industries and a far more powerful AI sector. David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wrote on X Saturday that AI leaders should take responsibility for their industry. “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission,” he wrote.
Still, there’s significant bipartisan concern. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz said that “we need substantially more regulation when it comes to AI,” in an interview with Politico last week. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a bill to permanently ban superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development pending federal regulation. Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, last week launched a probe into OpenAI over a rogue attack by its AI agents on another firm, Hugging Face, in July.
Senior Democrats are pushing for a faster government response. Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries said on ABC News’ “This Week” Sunday that Congress should take “decisive action” to slow down AI development and pledged that Democrats would meet to agree on a plan this week. Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego warned, “When we created a nuclear weapon, the nuclear weapon did not have the decisionmaking power to drop a nuclear weapon. AI has the capability and will have the capability to make decisions like that.” He also said on “State of the Union,” “This is more akin to Dr. Frankenstein telling us, ‘The monster is loose, help me stop the monster.’”
The whole mess lands where these systems always land: at the feet of people who didn’t build them, don’t control them, and still get told to wait for the right committee, the right bill, or the right election. President Trump appeared with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on January 21, 2025. Now the question hangs over the midterms and American politics more generally: who controls AI — humanity or machines?