Although none of them had been politically active before, they became part of a growing national movement pitting the tech industry and its billionaires against a diverse coalition of parenting groups, religious leaders, environmentalists and former Tea Party activists. Politically, they range from populist fanatic Stephen K. Bannon to Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont.
The reasons they turn away from technology are as varied as their origins. But everyone worries that tech companies are more focused on making money from AI than how it can affect ordinary people. They also share the feeling that all this money will flow into the hands of the ultra-rich in Silicon Valley, while the middle and working classes bear the cost.
Many of these critics of artificial intelligence argue that they are far from being Luddites who are just reacting badly to a new, scary technology. They believe that people in Washington, especially President Trump, are protecting Silicon Valley rather than influencing it. They want regulation — or at least debate — before artificial intelligence takes hold in American life.
“Given that artificial intelligence and robotics will affect every man, woman and child in this country, one would think there would be a massive debate in the United States Congress: What does this mean? Where do we go? How do we deal with it?” Mr. Sanders said in an interview with The New York Times. “There was minimal, minimal discussion.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement that “the Trump administration’s policy is to maintain the dominance of American artificial intelligence to protect our national security and ensure we remain a leading global economy.”
In the White House policy framework for artificial intelligencereleased last month, calls for AI services to protect children. This year, Mr. Trump, too issued a statement that technology companies “must pay the full cost of the energy and infrastructure required to build and operate data centers.”
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, the chatbot became the fastest growing software product ever, reaching 100 million users in just two months. It didn’t take long for the industry to bet its future on the new AI technology, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build the massive data centers needed to develop the technology now popping up around the world.
Even in the early days of the AI boom, industry leaders like Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei often warned that AI posed a risk to jobs and could have unpredictable, even dangerous, consequences.
“If this technology goes wrong, it can go pretty bad,” Mr. Altman said legislators in 2023.
The public may have taken these warnings to heart. In recent Quinnipiac University Survey 55 percent of American adults said they see artificial intelligence as a force for harm rather than good — a surprisingly negative reaction to a technology that has become an economic driver.
Mr Bannon said the negativity reflected concerns about how the technology had been introduced. “There’s no clarity, there’s no transparency, and there’s certainly no accountability,” he said on the podcast, “The latest invention,” in January. “That’s why you’ve seen not just interest, but anger building from working-class people.”
People new to the movement find a number of established organizations with ties to effective altruism, a philosophy that deals with AI security, among others Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, and Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, fund some of these groups.
The social media era that preceded it didn’t help AI’s reputation with the public either. Social media, despite its wild popularity, has been criticized for increasing political polarization and deteriorating mental health.
In March, Google-owned Meta and YouTube were found liable by a jury in Los Angeles for creating an addictive product that harmed a young user. The two companies, which together make more than $50 billion each quarter, were fined $6 million. A jury in a separate trial in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for failing to protect young users from sexual predators.
Tech job cuts also fuel the perception that Silicon Valley is gutting its own AI workforce before turning it on to the rest of the economy. Just last week, Meta said it was laying off 10 percent of its workforce, while Microsoft targeted up to 7 percent of its veteran employees in the United States with buyout offers. According to Census Bureau data, technology jobs will decrease by about 150,000 nationwide from 2022 to 2025.
Amy Kremer, a former Tea Party leader, recently became the chair of Humans First, a conservative anti-AI group. It emerged from the Center for Artificial Intelligence Security, which has powerful ties to altruism. She said the “social media monster” and lack of regulation inspired her to get involved.
“This is the battle of our lives,” she said.
(The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Tech leaders are acutely aware of the resistance. The risks were driven home this month when a man opposed to AI threw a Molotov cocktail at the front gate of Mr. Altman’s compound in San Francisco.
Not all tech executives have warned that AI can be dangerous as they build their AI empires. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, the maker of AI chips and the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, has consistently emphasized the opportunities of AI Mr. Huang says AI will help people do their jobs better, not replace them.
“More jobs will be created,” he said in January. “Housing will become more affordable.”
The industry’s most notable response so far has been to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs aimed at politicians questioning AI. The industry has also downplayed the backlash as a product of paranoia spread by so-called AI doomers who fear the technology could destroy humanity and NIMBYs, or not-in-my-backyard activists.
But those labels, common in Silicon Valley, are alien to many people who turn away from AI.
After hearing about a marriage damaged by an AI companion, Mr. Grayston, a pastor in Austin, organized hour long discussion at LifeFamily Church with the head of a local AI education nonprofit, the Alliance for Secure AI Action, which accepts donations from some individuals with ties to effective altruism.
Convinced that technology has a dark side, Mr Grayston, 42, has since spoken out about its dangers in other churches. opinion piece for a religious news website run by the conservative RealClearPolitics and helped design educational materials about artificial intelligence for other religious leaders.
“I’m not advocating the exemption of AI,” Mr Grayston said. “I want common sense regulation.
Mr. and Mrs. Snyder of Wolcott didn’t know what a data center was, they said, until they saw one approved in their backyard. After learning that the proposed facility would use more than four million gallons of water a day, Mr. Snyder, 59, feared it would turn a backyard pond where he catches largemouth bass into a crater. He sued to stop the project and funded a campaign to oust three officials who supported it.
The Snyders, who are self-described “hard-line Republicans” and support Mr. Trump, said the best thing that came out of the process was the relationships they built with people of all political stripes.
“Now I don’t care what your affiliation is,” Mr. Snyder said. “If you’re against data centers, we’ll join forces.”
In the Boise music halls where Mr. Gardner’s rock band Animus Gem plays, the 30-year-old bassist is among many artists, musicians and writers concerned about how the technology, which was trained using copyrighted material, can instantly create songs, pictures and books.
He and his wife, Cathryn, founded the local chapter of PauseAI, an American non-profit organization that works to stop the development of artificial intelligence, which has some funding from effective altruists. They made Boise one of 30 active groups in cities the organization expanded to last year, up from five in 2025. They now have 10 volunteers and 500 signatures on a petition to slow AI
“It really feels like exponential growth,” Ms Gardner said. “The arts community in Boise was really excited.
