An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/ai-democracy.html

43 Comments

  1. It’s incredible that both parties have decided to be on the wrong side of an 80-20 issue.

  2. Certainly not the party who wants to ban all AI regulation for the next 10 years on a federal level…

  3. IndicationDefiant137 on

    That will come from outside the existing political parties.

    Both of the existing political parties are in the pockets of the billionaires and Wall Street, and the irrational investments in AI that has no ROI are the only thing dragging the market up.

    The only way these trillions of dollars return on investment is if they are able to lay off 50+% of the American workforce.

    But then nobody is left to buy their crap, and starving peasants have a long history of picking up torches and pitchforks and dragging the lords on the hill out of their manors. That’s just a historical fact.

    Every CEO and board is only thinking about the layoff they want and not considering the ramifications of that same conversation happening in every executive presentation in the nation.

  4. Traditional-Hat-952 on

    $omething tell$ me neither $ide will. 

    But we all know who will be worse. 

  5. Neither. The tech-bro industry has all the money, and access to all the methods of distribution of attention. Nobody wants to piss them off, and a grassroots populist movement like that will face impossible challenges going at AI head-on like that.

    Folks hoping for the bubble to burst are just cheering on the hastening of the consolidation of resources and models so that the biggest players will have even more leverage with world governments.

    Candidates will focus on individual issues that are important to opponents to AI adoption. If you want to curb water and power usage, candidates should try to create incentives to make data-centers more efficient and use renewable resources. If you want to protect people from deceptive behavior, propose stronger anti-deep-fake laws, leverage trade-imbalances to bring China to sign-on to a global framework for ethical AI use.

    Small-government types will opt for the stick method where companies that are inefficient are punished. That approach will have an outsized effect on smaller companies. Big-government types will opt for the carrot method where companies are given financial incentives to become more efficient. This costs more money.

    A good model would be to encourage a sort-of federation of AI companies whereby you pay more into the pool of incentives if you use more resources to run your models; a bit like cap-and-trade for carbon, which worked really well until the Trump administration gutted the program.

  6. Devil’s advocate, even if this R&D doesn’t happen here in the US, it will happen elsewhere. Do we want another nation with objectively worse ideals to be at the forefront? Companies will just use AI models and services from that nation’s private sector.

  7. To answer this question, all you need to do is look up the career of Biden-era FTC commissioner Lina Khan (who is now on Mamdani’s transition team). She was an absolute force against the same big tech monopolies that are now the AI giants. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/15/mamdani-lina-khan-transition-team-private-equity.

    There is a reason all the tech douches came to bend the knee at Trump’s inauguration after many of them helped him get there. They cannot stand to be told no or have a check on their power and they are delusional about the impacts that getting their own way unfettered will have on the wider economy.

    And now Trump is saying no one else can regulate them either at the state level. If an anti-A.I. movement is coming, the hubris of the Trump-Big Tech alliance has to be brought to heel as task #1.

  8. Individual_Gold_7228 on

    Why does it need to be party based? Shouldn’t it just be candidate based? People can have mixed political differences across parties.

  9. It’ll turn from a concerned group into a lunatic fringe stoked by grifters, like the healthy living crowd. Nothing wrong with healthy living per se, but there’s profit in selling junk supplements and telling everyone not to vaccinate their kids.

  10. We ban AI, that’s the end. You guys believe that the ruling class of the world is going to stop? They’ll take it underground.

    There are zero scenarios where AI doesn’t keep moving forward. Illegal or not.

    Do you want AI advancing [mostly] in the public, or entirely behind closed doors?

  11. ishtar_the_move on

    Not the Chinese Communist Party, that’s for sure. They would be ok if Americans slow down their AI development.

  12. Neither. Both are owned by corporations

    There are anti fossil fuels, anti private health insurance , anti low wage movements in the country too. Hows that going in the capitalist hellhole “democracy”?

  13. We dont need anti ai. We need ai legislation that prevents consumer harm and produces a better and more robust and healthy ai

  14. AsphalticConcrete on

    Any large country thats “anti-ai” has 0 interest in being long term competitive. The military and technological implications alone AI has can fundamentally change how the world is operated. Why would any serious party be against that.

  15. JeebusChristBalls on

    Republicans will go all in because of money and corruption. Democrats will be publicly against it, but privately for it because of money and corruption.

  16. Wassersammler on

    Neither party will lead it, under current lobbying conditions. Consumers will lead it.

  17. Crypt0Nihilist on

    It doesn’t need leading. Once the insane amount of funding dries up and there’s less distortion of markets it’ll find its level.

    AI haters are just as awful as AI bros and promoting the polarisation into those camps is unhelpful.

  18. honey_biscuits108 on

    Neither, with socialist Dems being the only ones who might attempt local level reforms or safeguards.

  19. In 10 years, all this anti-AI fearmongering is going to be as laughable as the anti-computer fearmongering of the 80s.

    Remind me! 10 years

  20. Fearless-Edge714 on

    The anti-AI movement is on reddit and practically no one else cares. You guys need to go outside and realize the issues that are obsessed about on these websites don’t have as much attention as you think they do, regardless of if they should or not.

  21. Democrats would be insane to run on an anti a.i. policy. It wouldn’t gain them any votes but would piss off corporations.

  22. Dems will go along more with it but in the end neither will “lead” an anti-AI movement because money is way too important in US politics and both sides want it. Plus these megacap companies are doing so much of the investment in the economy that everyone wants their favor.

  23. tapdancinghellspawn on

    You’d think the Democrats would but way too many of them are owned and operated by Wall Street so their loyalty is more to corporations and less to the working people. Democrats need to embrace the working class and the poor or they are going to lose in 2028.

  24. Well it sure as shit isn’t the Republicans just based on every state’s effort to screw communities for data centers.

  25. Proud_Error_80 on

    If we’re putting our hopes on a PARTY we have already lost. This has to be a foundational ideology regardless of political standing in order to become a movement. Don’t let it be dismissed as identity politics.

  26. None, they may pay some lip service to it but no party can stop progress especially when rest of world is pushing ahead and there’s no choice but to try and keep up.

    It’s like trying to prevent industrial revolution or agriculture or trying to preserve elevator or phone operators.