MAGA Pumps The Brakes On AI As Trump Goes All In

WASHINGTON ― The populist wing of the Republican Party is beginning to worry that its embrace of artificial intelligence and efforts to shield the tech industry from regulation could backfire, leading to massive job losses that will empower billionaires over the working class.

The warnings from prominent voices within the MAGA world about AI adoption are coming as President Donald Trump works to aggressively expand the industry in a high-stakes race against China. The president this week ordered the nation’s science agencies to deploy AI as part of a broader government-wide effort to remove regulatory barriers for the industry. His administration is also reportedly considering issuing a controversial executive order that would restrict individual states that are tired of waiting on Congress to act from regulating AI. 

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“I don’t think we are doing enough to protect workers,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who opposes a moratorium on state regulation, said in an interview with HuffPost. “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?”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s MAGA whisperer and longtime ally, went so far as to calling AI the likely “most dangerous technology in the history of mankind.”

“I’m a capitalist,” Bannon said last week on his show, “The War Room.” “This is not capitalism. This is corporatism and crony capitalism.” He later told ABC News that without appropriate safeguards, AI could lead to a “jobs apocalypse” that would hurt working people, including many Trump supporters.

Some MAGA Republicans are also uncomfortable with the construction of huge data centersthat power AI or the idea of blocking states from regulating the industry, opposing the Trump administration’s efforts to include it in major legislation this year.

“Banning states from regulating AI for 10 years is a gift to Big Tech and a disaster for American workers and states’ rights,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is retiring in January, said after a moratorium on state regulation was dropped from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year.

On this issue, MAGA populists are strikingly aligned with progressive critics of AI. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has spent months warning the public about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and robotics, noting that the wealthiest people of the world like Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos stand to benefit the most by relying on automation — at the expense of working-class people whose jobs it may replace. 

“It will mean even more wealth and even more political power for these guys at the top, while our democracy gets weaker and weaker. Working people will see a significant decline in their standard of living unless we turn this around,” Sanders told NBC News. 

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Several tech companies in recent weeks have announcedmass layoffs, prompting dual concerns from economists that the U.S. could be entering a recession and that AI has already become so useful it’s making workers superfluous. 

Dean Baker, senior economist with the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, has pointed out the tech sector layoffs are relatively small next to the regular churn of the labor market, which typically sees more than a million layoffs per month even in good times. 

“The concern of mass unemployment, it seems kind of nuts,” Baker told HuffPost.

Baker noted that if AI increased worker productivity so much that it caused mass unemployment, it would also substantially boost broader economic growth and substantial improvement to the government’s fiscal outlook.

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“If your concern has been mass unemployment, then you must also think those other things [are true], and I don’t hear a lot of people saying that,” Baker said. “Those would go together.”

Still, Baker sees the labor market weakening alongside a tech-inflated stock bubblethat could cause a painful recession in the near future. Already, Trump’s allies in Silicon Valley, like his crypto and AI czar David Sacks, are urging investors not to take their foot off the gas on companies like Nvidia.

“According to today’s WSJ, AI-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth,” Sacks wrote in a social media post. “A reversal would risk recession. We can’t afford to go backwards.”

Other experts, including AI industry leaders and researchers, have warned about the wide range of risks associated with artificial intelligence, calling for government intervention and more stringent safety protocols. 

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“The people that lose their jobs won’t have jobs to go to,” Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Laureate who is known as the “Godfather of AI” due to his work on neural networks, told Sanders at an event last week on the risks of AI at Georgetown University. “If AI gets as smart as people, or smarter, any job they might do can be done by AI.”

AI-related job losses could be particularly severe among entry-level workers, who are experiencing higher-than-average unemployment rates following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think we are facing mass unemployment of entry-level knowledge jobs, and what we’re being asked to do here is cheerlead that,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview with HuffPost. “I think AI’s got a tremendous amount of potential, but we have to be clear-eyed about their primary selling proposition [and] how disruptive it is, and how much more profit they will make. How do they make all that new profit? By not having to hire people.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) predicted that unemployment among recent college graduates could spike from 9% to as much as 20-25%, while Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a former attorney, said young people seeking to enter the legal profession could suffer.

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“It won’t impact blue-collar workers, you know, you can’t use AI to fix a sink,” he said. “But for a lot of professional workers, it’s going to have an impact. I understand it’s already having an impact on coders.”

Congress has barely begun to grapple with AI and its ramifications. While lawmakers have introduced legislation and convened hearings on various aspects of the industry, they are still far from coming to a consensus on a nationwide federal regulatory standard. Under the Biden administration, a group of bipartisan senators led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) released in 2023 a roadmap for AI that was meant to guide policymakers as they craft bills to address it. That effort has largely gone nowhere under Trump, as most Republicans have followed his lead on advancing the industry, dismissing concerns about pain points. 

“Any new technology is going to be disruptive,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told HuffPost. “This is going to be an extraordinarily disruptive technology. But I’m also very optimistic about the productivity gains that we’re going to experience.”

Lawmakers are also alarmed by the intelligence and national security implications of AI adoption. Recently, a Chinese state-sponsored group used AI to launch a cyber-attack against global financial firms and government agencies, the first documented case of a large-scale AI cyberattack without substantial human intervention. 

“Guys wake the f up. This is going to destroy us - sooner than we think - if we don’t make AI regulation a national priority tomorrow,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) warned after the attack.

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