Top executives from AI giants are making regular visits to Capitol Hill. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be here today. The tech titans are hiring lobbyists and well-known consultants from both parties. And they’re shelling out tens of millions of dollars to shape public opinion on how their platforms are safe and beneficial to society.
Yet their message seems to have landed on deaf ears with an important constituency: top Democrats.
If Democrats take control of Congress in 2027, the nation’s leading AI companies are in for a reckoning. Consider the positions that key progressives have recently staked out.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Monday that he’s going to introduce a bill to give taxpayers a 50% stake in the nation’s largest AI companies. The progressive firebrand is also pushing for a federal moratorium on data centers.
Last week, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, joined the chorus of Democrats pushing for an AI tax, writing in an op-ed that America needs to raise revenue from tech companies to “slow down job loss.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) declared it was “disgusting” that Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer approved the expansion of data centers in Michigan.
Carl Heastie, the New York state House speaker, said Tuesday that the Empire State legislature would enact a one-year moratorium on data center construction. New York is the latest state to look at putting the brakes on AI facilities.
Make no mistake about it — these progressive stands will become benchmarks for the rest of the Democrats, both in the midterms and the 2028 presidential race.
AI’s spectacular rise has been scrambling politics for months. The stock market has soared, with trillions embedded in an interlocking series of massive tech companies. Data center construction has boomed. Electricity prices, the cost of water and other materials are rising.
Yet voters are getting antsy about the technology, and even President Donald Trump — who quietly signed his own AI executive order Tuesday — is moving to a more hands-on approach.
The most influential voices on the left are trying to get Democrats to go much further.
The politics. Sanders’ AI gauntlet is finding fans in the upper ranks of the Senate Democratic Caucus.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who’s poised to be the next Senate Democratic whip, said he’s ready to consider public ownership of AI platforms.
“I’m intrigued,” Schatz said.
The politics are almost too easy for progressives. Many Americans aren’t interacting with AI in a meaningful way. And the left has the opportunity to shape the narrative that this could be a world-changing technology that permanently alters long-standing social contracts if it isn’t reined in quickly.
The AI message fits neatly into progressive Democrats’ preferred 2026 slogans: thanks to Trump and the GOP-Congress, billionaires have undue influence over the U.S. economy and society.
“These midterms in part will be fought over the central issue of whether the government is just a toy of the billionaires, or it’s actually a vital force that sets the rules so that working families have a real chance to build a future,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said.
Mods. The challenge for the center of the Democratic Party is that they’re tasked with pushing back against a populist wing that appeals to voters’ greatest fears.
When Democratic Rep. Sam Liccardo from Silicon Valley rejects calls for a data center moratorium, he cites the facilities’ “internal cooling cycle systems” to note that they consume much less water than many people think. It’s a wonky message for such a visceral issue.
Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) brings jars of brown water to a hearing to make her case that data centers are poisoning communities.
“The great challenge of our age is how we can break through the noise to enable dialogue,” Liccardo said.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), who co-leads the party’s AI commission, said progressives are dominating the AI discussion because they’re pushing “incendiary things.”
“Sanders would like to put AI in a box and lock it up and make it go away. That’s not reality,” Gottheimer said.
The Trump factor. Skepticism of huge AI companies and their mega-billionaire owners is a natural fit for the politics of progressive Democrats, but some Republicans hope to harness the unease, too.
Trump took some of the first far-reaching moves on AI anxiety in January when he got major labs and cloud providers to commit to supplying energy to their own data centers.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a longtime tech skeptic, has also been vocal about his willingness to work with Democrats to rein in the major platforms.
“A sovereign wealth fund is not necessarily a bad idea,” Hawley said, though he warned he wouldn’t love “the government owning AI.”
On Tuesday, Trump formalized his pivot toward greater attention to catastrophic AI risk, signing an executive order that establishes a voluntary 30-day government preview of advanced models. But the order still relies on a largely voluntary approach.
Valley view. Silicon Valley stalwarts believe they’ll be able to satisfy their skeptics and move the entire Congress to a friendlier position.
Yet they face a raft of challenges: NIMBYism, tech skepticism, energy and water issues and privacy challenges.
OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, Chris Lehane, thanked Sanders for his idea in a LinkedIn post, noting the company’s proposals for AI taxes and what the firm has called a “Public Wealth Fund.”
“[T]he principle is right: if AI creates enormous value, Americans should share directly in that value,” Lehane wrote.
