Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

AI Is a Kitchen-Table Issue

And with the Trump administration encouraging unregulated growth in the industry, Democrats need to start acting like it.

CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, President Donald Trump, and CEO of DeepMind Demis Hassabis at a working lunch during the G7 Summit on June 17 in Évian-les-Bains, France.

The Republican Party sports a glaring weakness in the pitched battle over regulating the rapidly multiplying abuses of AI, and its name is Donald John Trump. The president sought to dismiss the growing furor about the multitude of threats the unregulated new technology poses to our basic quality of life by proclaiming on Truth Social that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

But while the MAGAfied GOP is ambling cluelessly into yet another political firestorm, the Democratic Party is lapsing once more into its resting-shrug posture. Yes, there are serious hazards associated with the blind lunge into all things AI—up to and including species extinction—party elders and strategists concede, but it’s important not to get carried away on the tide of public outrage. So, as Trump fulminated and flattered himself, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries announced the appointment of a new AI policy panel made up mostly of flacks and shills for the industry. Because whenever the leaders of an economic sector let it slip that they may well be programming the imminent demise of humanity, the first thing you do is grant them the authority to make up their own rules of oversight.

Jeffries’s gambit was, alas, a continuation of the party’s dilatory-to-negligent approach to all things AI. During the 119th Congress, Democratic lawmakers have mostly marshaled themselves behind vague and airy bids to draft regulation of the industry through bipartisan task forces stressing broad alignment on the issue, an approach that has yielded much the same results the most such initiatives do. “Congressional leaders have let bipartisan working groups fall apart, dragging out progress on issues lawmakers from both parties say they could get a meaningful majority behind,” NOTUS reporter Samuel Larreal wrote late last year. Even though some 400 pending bills in 2025 had addressed the many threats poised by untrammeled AI development, none gained traction; indeed, the most dogged GOP-driven campaign was to deregulate the industry further, via language in both the tax-and-spending and defense authorization bills that would have preempted state and local governments from curbing the growth of AI data centers and applications in their midst.

This lost opportunity stands out in high relief now, as Democratic leaders try to launch belated new bids to rein in the excesses of the AI sector before Congress adjourns for the midterms—and as a new cohort of Democratic-aligned PACs push for a more robust Democratic response to the uprising against it. (Lest you think this latter development signals any sort of fundamental change in establishment........

© The Nation