Bernie Sanders’s New, Necessary, Bold Act: Taking on the AI Oligarchs

This time last year, Senator Bernie Sanders was giving speeches in front of thousands of people, decrying what he correctly describes as an “oligarchy” that dominates American business and politics. But this year, Sanders’s most noteworthy move was sitting in a dark room by himself, asking questions to Claude. While the senator listened intently, Claude described how companies are using artificial intelligence in ways that are eroding Americans’ privacy and could eliminate their jobs. 

Claude is of course the name of the AI tool created by the company Anthropic. Sanders was trying to dramatize this new technology by having the bot itself explain its enormous powers. The Vermont senator, once pushing free college, Medicare for All, and wealth taxes, has now become perhaps the loudest voice in America warning of the dangers of AI. He is giving speeches around the country, as well as writing op-eds. He is pushing cities and states to ban AI data centers and recently introduced a bill that would ban them nationwide. He is mobilizing people in the tech industry skeptical of AI to speak up, hoping they will be even more credible voices than the senator himself. 

Leading the anti-AI charge may be one of the last big acts in politics for the 84-year-old Sanders. And this is a critical mission. The Democratic Party and the country desperately need a leader who isn’t afraid of being portrayed as a Luddite or anti-business and will therefore forcefully air concerns about the proliferation of AI leading to mass employment, environmental degradation, and an even greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Sanders has stepped into this void. His advocacy could reshape discourse and policy on this issue, just as he has played a critical role over the last decade in getting the country refocused on income inequality. 

“We’re looking at the most transformational economic revolution in world history, and Congress is way, way behind the eight ball on it,” the senator told me in an interview last week.  

The battle over AI is a natural outgrowth of Sanders’s focus on billionaires over the last year (and really much of his career.) Many of the people and companies that the Vermont senator has long warned are growing too powerful are also big players in AI. So he rattles off the names of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg in his AI remarks, just as he did in his anti-oligarchy speeches last year. 

And like the Big Tech industry that has created many of those billionaires’ fortunes, AI is a complicated enemy. Millions of Americans are using AI for writing and research, just as they bought iPhones and started using Google en masse in the recent past. Like other new technologies, AI offers some clear benefits to American society, such as making it easier to conduct research on diseases. 

Another parallel between the AI industry and the big corporations that Sanders has long railed against is the former’s growing political power. The initial construction of an AI data center often creates hundreds of jobs, a boon to local and state politicians. AI companies are spending tens of millions of dollars in campaigns to elect politicians (Republicans and Democratic) who have signaled that they will oppose tighter  regulation of the industry. And many Democratic politicians are wary of opposing AI and therefore being cast as anti-innovation and anti-business, which might make it harder for them to raise money from wealthy donors and appeal to moderate voters. 

“Why aren’t more Democrats speaking out about this issue? …Because AI has made it known to everybody, they’re coming after you” if you oppose their agenda, Faiz Shakir, one of Sanders’s political advisers, told me. “The amount of money they’re pouring into Democratic primary races is out of control.” 

So this isn’t an easy fight. What’s Sanders’s strategy? First of all, he is emphasizing that he is not anti-technology. “I am not a Luddite, let me be clear about that,” he said, when I invoked that term in our conversation. When I asked if he had an iPhone, the two-time presidential candidate laughed, said yes, and jokingly added, “I even watch television and use the computer ….and drive a car.” He noted that he rode in a driverless car during a recent trip to the Bay Area. 

Second, Sanders is keeping an open mind about what exactly an America (and world) with AI looks like. He is not calling for a policy that would somehow result in no American workers losing their jobs due to AI. Nor is he trying to protect specific industries or categories of workers. Instead, Sanders is arguing that we don’t want a repeat of the 1990s and early 2000s, when international trade agreements enriched corporations but left many manufacturing workers and towns impoverished. 

“The one thing for sure that we start off with is that AI and robotics cannot simply benefit the richest people in the world. Okay? That’s the starting point,” he told me. 

He added, “If you’re going to throw millions of people out on the street, what happens to them? Should there be, in one way or another, guaranteed healthcare to all Americans … making sure that everybody has at least a minimum income? These are some of the issues that have to be discussed.” 

So his bill, coauthored with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, isn’t a permanent ban on data centers. Instead, it calls for a moratorium while Congress and the country overall consider the implications of the proliferation of AI.

Finally, while Sanders twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and identifies as a democratic socialist, he is trying to build a broad coalition on this issue that includes tech industry veterans, rank-and-file Republican voters, and others who don’t necessarily support his leftist positions like single-payer healthcare. The Vermont senator namedrops figures in the tech industry he speaks to, such as Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist and early pioneer of AI technology who left Google in 2023 because he wanted to speak out more about the dangers of AI. In another of his videos, Sanders interviewed officials from the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute and a former employee of OpenAI. They warned that AI could eventually have more knowledge and power than humans. 

Sanders, who usually focuses on economic policy, is also emphasizing the non-economic downsides of AI, potentially connecting with social conservatives. In our interview, he lamented that many young people say their AI companions are among their closest friends. He argued that work is part of “human fulfillment,” so it might be detrimental to society if AI takes Americans’ jobs even if the government provides the newly unemployed enough benefits to live comfortably. 

The Vermont senator sees this issue as cutting across partisan lines. In our conversation, Sanders cited a recent Quinnipiac University poll that showed 55 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe that AI will “do more harm than good” in their lives. Just 34 percent feel its benefits outweigh its costs. 

“A growing percentage of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all say that AI is likely to hurt the economy, and a majority believe AI is likely to increase the unemployment rate,” Ryan O’Donnell, executive director of the liberal polling firm Data For Progress, told me. “When Sanders warns about the risks of artificial intelligence, he’s speaking directly to the anxiety voters are already feeling about affordability, job security, and unchecked corporate power.” 

Will Sanders succeed? He already has, to some extent. Sanders has tapped into opposition against data centers that had emerged even before he took up the issue. Now, communities across the country, including in red states, are stalling or outright blocking the construction of data centers. Lawmakers in Maine are likely to soon pass what would be the first statewide ban on data center construction. While congressional Republicans and the Trump White House are still largely supportive of AI, a growing number of progressive Democrats are following Sanders’s lead in raising concerns about the technology. 

Perhaps the clearest sign of Sanders’s impact is how Democratic governors and potential 2028 candidates such as Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro are backtracking from some of their initial enthusiasm about AI data centers being built in their state. “They underestimated the public anger,” said Shakir.

But even if data centers are stalled, the bigger danger is that politics moves slower than business. AI could wipe out millions of jobs and further enrich the super-wealthy while governors and senators are still studying the problem. After all, AI usage is rapidly growing, and companies both in the United States and abroad are spending billions on the technology. Meanwhile, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s data center ban has little chance of passing, since many politicians are deeply afraid the industry will spend millions to defeat them at election time. 

So Sanders’s goals are modest. At least right now, he’s less trying to pass legislation than simply start a conversation. 

“The question that we have to ask is, “How do we use AI to improve life for all people?’” he said. “And just blindly following the lead of Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos is not the way to do it. We need to have that kind of discussion. There’s a new technology, a new world that’s coming. Let’s make sure it benefits all of us, and not just a handful of billionaires.”