Democrats’ newest existential threat has arrived and, amazingly, all of the party’s leading figures seemingly discovered it at the same time!
Over the past few days, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jeffries, and Ro Khanna have begun warning that AI is advancing fast, could be dangerous, and may require international treaties or regulatory oversight or a development moratorium or even a full-on government shut down.
Maybe these are all fair points that all the aforementioned Democrats coincidentally came up with on their own and just happened to reach the same conclusion as their fellow counterparts — or maybe the talking points went out.
AI is “gambling with our lives” — so said Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon pertaining to OpenAI and Anthropic. Coxen said that both are acting irresponsibly and are “racing straight to self-improving super intelligence.”
Coxon went so far as to say the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
It’s a scary warning. Maybe it’s true! Maybe it’s partially true and partially false. Either way, Democrats in recent days have suddenly become extremely concerned about AI.
ABC News reported that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the Democrat caucus planned to meet and a “high priority will be action on artificial intelligence.”
The New York Times headlined a piece noting that “Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda.”
Some Democrats and Democrat-adjacent leaders have already adopted a similar stance. California Rep. Ro Khanna told Playbook “We need to ban self-improving AI and need a federal regulatory AI agency to prevent catastrophic harm.”
Meanwhile, former Vice President Kamala Harris said on X: “The frontier of artificial intelligence is advancing at an alarming speed. Over the weekend, industry leaders voiced support for an idea that the American people and many AI researchers in their own labs have been calling for: We must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development. A slowdown is critical in order to ensure AI serves the public interest.”
Harris said we have to “impose common-sense safety standards” and urged President Donald Trump to pursue “a treaty with countries like China to stop dangerous uses of AI, limit the speed of its development, and adopt global standards for testing.”
Democrat puppet master and former President Barack Obama said Washington has to “get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread.”
“Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box,” Obama said. “But we can collectively determine how it’s developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the government needs to take AI “head on.”
“AI is moving quickly. And for Congress to just sit on its hands, for the White House to do nothing real is something that is deeply dangerous to the American people and the world,” Buttigieg said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “There need to be safeguards. There need to be rules. There need to be limits. There needs to be a kill switch on rogue AI. You can set up frameworks that can be adjusted and changed every 30 days.”
The pattern is somewhat easy to spot. Politicians — which even of the same party are rare to quickly get on the same page about anything — are all at once arguing AI is moving too fast for the government to stand idly by. While the wording may vary, the message is largely that AI presents a threat and that private entrepreneurs cannot be trusted, so instead we need federal intervention, oversight, and perhaps international treaties.
The sudden focus isn’t that much of a surprise at all, though, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pointed out, according to Playbook.
“Democrats could seize the issue if the GOP cedes the ground,” DeSantis warned, and it appears Democrats are doing exactly that: unifying around the message and posture that their party is the only party that is wiling or caring enough about saving Americans from AI and the billionaires supposedly plotting the destruction of the human race.
Strategist Morris Katz said if Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stick together on pushing a data-center moratorium, Democrats would pick up seats: “We’re not going to let a billionaire class tell us what’s inevitable and f**k over the American people again.”
Katz says Democrats should be “the party that lays down these tracks to stop Sam Altman and a handful of billionaires from destroying your lives to become trillionaires.”
It’s clear that Katz is making the electoral calculation that DeSantis referred to explicit.
In other words, though, Katz let the cat out of the bag. The sudden fixation on AI by Democrats — and their coincidental same approach — seems to do more with political power calculations than a general concern about AI. Artificial intelligence is giving Democrats a new villain, a new crisis, a new justification for government control all while they position themselves as our protectors.
To be clear, it doesn’t mean concerns about AI aren’t legit. There’s a lot of reason to worry about AI and question its place in our world. But it’s hard not to question whether the problems Democrats are suddenly raising are legitimate, or part of a political calculus.
