Brendan Steinhauser, chief executive of the Alliance for Secure AI and another former tea party figure, said he recommended Kremer to Humans First and has been trying to draw others from the movement into the fight over AI.
“We need more conservative voices who care about this stuff to not only take action, but to be doing this full time,” Steinhauser said. “Tea party people know how to organize.”
By Ian Duncan
In the hours before a violent mob descended on the U.S. Capitol, Amy Kremer led a rally near the White House calling on Congress to overturn President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
Five years later, Kremer still saysthe election was stolen. But these days she has a new target: artificial intelligence companies.
In the rise of AI, the former tea party movement leadersays she sees a danger reminiscent of the populist anger that has long propelled her to action. She points to an out-of-touch Silicon Valley elite controlling a technology allowed to run amok without any safeguards.
As the chair of Humans First, a conservative advocacy group,Kremer is trying to turn the right’s populist energy against AI labs and the billionaire tech executives who have forged relationships with President Trump.
“I want the American people to have a seat at the table and a voice in how this technology is used in our lives,” Kremer said. “These people do not care about conservatives, about Republicans, or about the American people. All they care about is power and control and money.“
Humans First announced last week that it is planning anti-data center rallies across five states on July 18, invoking “the spirit of the Tea Party.”
A majority of the American public has soured on the technology, worried that a boom that helped make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire will mean waves of job losses and the construction of energy-hungry data centers in communities across the country.
Those fears are taking root across the political spectrum,with calls for reining in the technology coming from both ardent supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and one-time tea party activists like Kremer.
Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman who runs the pro-regulation group Americans for Responsible Innovation, compared the burgeoning alliance to the way the French resistance brought together people with opposing ideologies during World War II.
“AI safety is the same,” Carson said. “Left and right can fight about the future once we’ve made sure there is one.”
For Trump, the groundswell of opposition to AI has created a fissure in the coalition that helped return him to the White House — and represents a challenge to the wealthy Silicon Valley figures who have shaped his administration’s largely hands-off approach to overseeing the technology.
Late last year, the White House revised an executive order in the face of backlash from the MAGA base,shifting draft legislation imposing federal oversight of AI to allow states to continue regulating data centers and implementing child safety protections. Conservative activists recently pushed the Trump administration to take a strict approach to overseeing the computer hacking abilities of new AI models.
For her part, Kremer says she remains staunchly behind much of Trump’s agenda, backing mass deportations and continuing to say that the 2020 election was “stolen.” (She did not join the mob that stormed the Capitol after the rally.) But she blames tech executives for giving him bad advice and says Congress ought to share in the blame for not taking up AI regulation.
“While everybody wants to make it about President Trump, it’s really not about President Trump, it is about our lawmakers doing their damn job,” she said.
The White House said that while it recognizes the public’s concerns about jobs, its goal is to unleash an era of broadly shared economic growth.
“The Trump Administration is committed to securing American dominance in AI, while simultaneously creating new opportunities for American workers to excel in this transformative era,” White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said.
Kremer got her start in politics in 2009.A former Delta Air Lines flight attendant, she began connecting with other activists on the young social media network then known as Twitter and helped start the modern tea party. That movement drew on anger about the bailout of big financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis and the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and eventually helped elect a new generation of Republican politicians.
Brendan Steinhauser, chief executive of the Alliance for Secure AI and another former tea party figure, said he recommended Kremer to Humans First and has been trying to draw others from the movement into the fight over AI.
“We need more conservative voices who care about this stuff to not only take action, but to be doing this full time,” Steinhauser said. “Tea party people know how to organize.”
Kremer said AI had not been much on her mind until 2024 when she started hearing about protests over data center construction and detected an anti-elite energy similar to that which originally propelled the tea party. But she said she was little interested in technology and initially skeptical of turning AI activism into a job.
“If you had told me a year ago I would be doing this, I would have told you to put down the crack pipe,” Kremer said.
But as she learned about cases where chatbots appeared to have had a role in people dying by suicide or harming themselves, her concern grew and ultimately agreed to join Humans First.
The group was incubated by the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco outfit that warns the technology could “invite catastrophe” and seeks to tame risks from malicious users to AI itself going rogue.The center provided a loan as seed funding, said Alexander McCoy, a former Humans First leader. The center’s co-founder was listed on incorporation papers filed in California as the chief executive of Humans First. The center did not respond to requests for comment.
The AI safety center’s involvement has prompted accusations from some of Trump’s supporters in the tech industry that Humans First is little more than a front organization. The investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks quoted an article on X detailing the links between the two that described it as “a censorship power play dressed up in safety language.”
Originally Humans First was conceived as a bipartisan coalition and it launched with a series of town hall events this spring. But Kremer and McCoy, who was brought on as the head of its left-wing arm, said it soon became clear that it would be challenging to hold together two sides that use different political languages and need different allies.
McCoy, a Marine veteran who campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, said he got along well with Kremer, despite their deep political differences.
“It speaks to the critical nature of regulating and controlling big AI that people like Amy and I, that have very little else in common and have spent our careers fighting each others movements, are recognizing the same threat it in a kind of ‘Independence Day’ way,” he said, referring to the 1996 movie in which humanity unites to repel an alien invasion.
But with Republicans holding power in Washington, McCoy said the two wings decided they needed to be free to spread their own messages.
“We have the time to have the difficult debates within the left on what the right way forward is,” said McCoy, who is planning to launch his own organization.
In the face of mounting public anger of electricity costs and concerns about the potentially dangerous power of new systems, the Trump administration has begun to rethink its approach to the technology.
Kremer’s side and Trump’s tech industry allies have tussled in recent weeks over the White House’s response to computer security threats from new AI models. She joined Steinhauser, “War Room” host Stephen K. Bannon and religious leaders to send a letter calling for strict testing of potentially-dangerous models, just days before Sacks helped briefly derail a proposed executive order.
When Trump finally did sign the order, it provided for only limited federal oversight and was pared back with Sacks’s blessing. But it was enough for Kremer to claim a victory — and praise Trump in the process.
“Today is a win for the conservative movement and more generally for the forces of humanity and a loss for the big AI extremists,” she wrote. “President Trump has once again shown that you can promote American innovation without sacrificing American values.”