WASHINGTON – Prominent critics of artificial intelligence warned that the industry’s plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this year’s midterm elections are aimed at blocking Congress from regulating a rapidly advancing technology that poses serious risks to society, including jobs, energy prices, and privacy, along with more existential dangers.
“The big money interests, the billionaires who control our economy and our political system, are going to do everything to elect people to give them a green light to go forward,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is planning to introduce legislation prohibiting the construction of data centers that power AI, said in an interview with HuffPost. “I happen to believe that Congress and the American people are totally unprepared for the transformational and radical impact it’s going to have on our society.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another leading advocate of regulating AI, said the industry is trying “to make sure that they can continue doing whatever they want.”
“It’s a problem,” she added.
AI companies have modeled their lobbying efforts after crypto-backed groups, another influential segment of the tech industry that invested heavily in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Crypto super PACs spent tens of millions of dollars, for example, on ads to block Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) from being elected to the Senate last year. They did the same to oust former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and elect his replacement, crypto-friendly GOP businessman Bernie Moreno, who now holds his seat.
Leading The Future, the main pro-AI industry super PAC backed by OpenAI, plans to spend at least $100 million to support candidates who favor AI adoption with minimal regulatory hindrances. They’ve begun deploying their resources in congressional races, spending $5 million in support of Rep. Byron Donalds’ (R-Fla.) bid for governor in Florida and contributing $1 million to defeat Alex Bores, a Democratic assemblyman from New York who spearheaded new rules on the industry, quickly making himself a target.
Meanwhile, Anthropic, another AI company founded by former OpenAI executives, announced this week that it is investing $20 million in another super PAC focused on strengthening industry guardrails. The dueling AI super PACs could upend both parties’ coalitions and the tech industry itself.
“Those who have already followed a model of walled gardens, and there will be only two or three players in this space, want one kind of regulation, but those who are investing in the startups want something very different,” Warren said, acknowledging the split in the industry. “But they’re all here to try to buy advantage from a pliant Congress.”
Warren met this week with the CEO of Anthropic, which backs limits on selling the powerful chips necessary to power A.I. to China. Warren and Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) have introduced legislation to limit such sales.
Sanders, meanwhile, is traveling to California next weekend, where he will meet with AI industry leaders and hold a town hall at Stanford University with Rep. Ro Khanna on “who controls the future of AI.”
Many Democrats have begun railing against the rapid buildout of data centers ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as voters blame the industry for spiking electricity prices. Even industry-friendly moderates like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are supporting some limits on data center construction. But Sanders said his concerns go deeper.
“What I am looking at right now goes beyond electric rates,” he said on a call with reporters on Thursday. “It goes to who will control, essentially control, this transformative technology. Will it simply be Elon Musk? And Bezos and other multi-billionaires who will make huge amounts of money off of this. Or will AI and robotics work to improve life for human beings?”
The White House and the GOP-controlled Congress, with the support of wealthy allies in Silicon Valley, have embraced lax regulation of AI on the grounds that any effort to put guardrails in place will ensure the U.S. loses the AI development race to China. The Trump administration has ordered a government-wide deployment of AI while seeking to restrict individual states that are tired of waiting on Congress to act from regulating the industry at all.
Some populist Republicans and MAGA allies of President Donald Trump have urged the administration to pump the brakes, warning what rapid adoption of AI could do to the economy.
“I don’t think we are doing enough to protect workers,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told HuffPost recently. “We need to do more because I’m confident Silicon Valley will get rich from this… But what about blue-collar workers in my state?”
The vast majority of Republicans, however, are cheering on the AI race even as experts who work in the industry raise more and more scary-sounding alarms about how quickly it is advancing.
Congress can’t even agree on a framework for regulation, much less actual legislation. The breakdown of negotiations over crypto legislation in the Senate earlier this month shows just how difficult it will be to produce any AI regulations, at least not before November’s midterm elections and even the 2028 presidential election.
“There obviously is an effective moratorium in the U.S. when it comes to interest in either domestic regulation or international regulation,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of AI at a panel with other leaders at the Munich Security Conference. “The industry right now is spending millions of dollars trying to suppress conversations in the U.S at the state and federal level around a regulatory framework.”
“So it becomes very difficult for any president to prioritize bringing this conversation to China or our allies abroad if hundreds of millions of dollars spent by AI companies and by technology companies are trying to destroy enthusiasm or conversation about regulation,” he said. “That’s the political reality.”