In the world according to the “War Room”, a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist, woke liberals and shadowy globalists are out to get America. But in recent months the show has drawn a new battle line. Artificial intelligence (AI), Mr Bannon warned in a recent episode, would soon engender “the most fundamental, radical transformation” in human history. “It must be stopped, slowed down and put in the control of humans and not the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” Those horsemen, Mr Bannon says, are the chief executives of America’s leading AI firms. This is the most visible split between two irreconcilable factions within MAGA: secular techno-libertarians and religious paleo-conservatives. And, given the valuations of the AI economy, its promises and pitfalls, it may be the most consequential one.
Some of Silicon Valley’s AI elite has indeed cosied-up to the president. For his part, Donald Trump appears taken by the technology. (“We should change the name…it’s not artificial, it’s pure genius.”) His AI Action Plan, issued in the summer, called for deregulation to unleash “global AI dominance,” delighting MAGA accelerationists.
The MAGA decelerationist wing has two kinds of objection. The first is practical. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia and, until recently, a staunch Trump loyalist, warns that AI will lead to mass unemployment among working-class Americans. Others fret about children and teens being caught in manipulative, sometimes even erotic, relationships with large language models. Angela Paxton, a Trumpy Republican state senator from Texas who helped pass a state ban on using AI to create sexually explicit content that features children, says she broadly supports AI experimentation. “I just draw the line when it comes to beta testing on our children.”
The second set of concerns is more spiritual. According to Mr Bannon, big tech is using AI to create a system of “techno-feudalism” in which average Americans would be reduced to “digital serfs”. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, rails against what he calls “transhumanism”, a purported belief among the tech elite that humans should use AI to enhance their physical and cognitive abilities. “Americanism and the transhumanist revolution cannot coexist,” he warned at a conservative gabfest earlier this year. In this account, AI threatens not just work but the soul: it will make some men richer while impoverishing mankind.
These two factions are clashing over a more prosaic question: whether states should regulate AI. In the absence of a federal framework, many states have started passing their own laws. That is anathema to the accelerationists, who are better-funded than the Luddite wing. Their main objective is to secure passage of federal legislation that pauses states’ rights to regulate AI. A similar law, which would have imposed a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI laws, failed in the Senate in July. On November 19th the Trump administration considered imposing an executive order that would quash state regulation on AI. They want to get ahead of a New York law which seeks to regulate large language models, following the passage of a similar law in California in September.
Many state-level MAGA-ites, such as Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, opposed the move, stressing that stripping states of the right to regulate AI would let big-tech firms run rampant. Meanwhile within the White House, David Sacks, Mr Trump’s “AI and Crypto Czar”, who is also a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has railed against what he claims are 1,000 bills introduced across all 50 states to regulate AI. He considers them part of a “doomer-industrial complex” that he believes will hamper America’s ability to compete in the race for AI supremacy against China. He supports a moratorium on state AI bills.
Mr Trump has taken Mr Sacks’s side, for now, arguing for “one federal standard instead of a patchwork of 50 state regulatory regimes”. It is not clear, though, what the White House believes such a federal standard should contain. Mr Sacks appears to be most concerned about regulating AI to prevent left-wing bias in LLMs, or what he calls “woke AI”. Some in the tech industry suspect that is merely cover for minimal regulation. Mr Sacks’s MAGA opponents are suspicious of his motives. “The president is not well served by those folks,” says Brendan Steinhauser, a veteran Republican strategist campaigning for states’ rights on regulation. “They’ve been able to insert themselves in the White House…to get richer and more powerful.”
Outside the White House, prominent venture capitalists and MAGA donors such as Marc Andreessen, of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm, and techies such as Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, have thrown their weight behind “Leading the Future”, a super PAC with more than $100m in funding that is lobbying against state-by-state AI regulations. A new $10m initiative from the America First Policy Institute, a group with deep ties to the Trump team, is trying to ease divisions within MAGA by developing policies that would support workers affected by AI.
One representative of a tech-lobbying organisation says forcing AI firms to navigate contradictory state laws would be like “tying our own shoelaces together”, or worse still, would make America like the EU. He says there are lessons to be learned from the early days of the internet, which was given a tailwind from having federal, rather than state-by-state, regulations. He says there are sufficient statutes on states’ books covering consumer rights, child safety, fraud and cybersecurity to cover AI crimes, without creating new ones.
Yet the light-touch approach to the early internet is no longer universally accepted as a model to follow. Though big tech firms unsurprisingly say a single federal law would be better for them, some will also admit that the utopianism of the 1990s and 2000s was mistaken, and this has changed the politics of regulating tech. The same goes for many conservatives. “Because of the last several decades…the trust reservoir is depleted,” says Wes Hodges of the Heritage Foundation, another MAGA think-tank. And the split over state regulations also pits lots of people within MAGA against federalism—another reminder that many of them were not very conservative in the first place.
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