President Donald Trump’s AI action plan has set off a backlash from some of the biggest figures in the America First movement — a rift expected to shape the next round of arguments in Congress about how to turbocharge the technology.
Trump’s rush toward AI is exposing an important faultline in the Republican coalition: Many of its voters and leaders deeply mistrust the power of Big Tech, but Trump himself has worked closely with industry CEOs to deliver on their priorities.
The AI argument kicked off in late July, just a day after Trump announced his AI plan — a 28-page strategy to accelerate the technology and build new power infrastructure to supply it.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) fired off a tirade on X, complaining that AI could create mass poverty by replacing human jobs, and giant AI data centers could have potentially devastating effects on the environment and water supply.
In the days that followed, GOP strategist Steven Bannon chimed in, comparing the pursuit of AI superintelligence to “summoning the demon.” And since then, think-tankers and populist conservative outlets have continued to stoke worries about federal policies that turbocharge AI development.
On stage at the National Conservatism conference in Washington in early September, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) criticized the AI revolution as a leap towards transhumanism — a human-machine future that he said is currently against “the working man” and the teachings of the Bible, as well as installing “a rich and powerful elite.”
“Americanism and the transhumanist revolution cannot coexist,” Hawley said — a declaration met with spontaneous applause from the audience.
Asked about conservative concerns regarding the Trump administration’s AI plans, White House spokesperson Liz Huston did not acknowledge the criticism, responding: “President Trump is committed to maintaining US dominance in AI over China. By fully harnessing the power of AI, we will unleash this productivity for the full benefit of workers while driving down costs for services and goods to make America more affordable.”
For their part, the populist conservatives won a round in Washington over the summer, killing off a proposed moratorium in Congress that would discourage states from making AI regulations for a decade. Many GOP senators and attorneys general objected that it would prevent their own states from enforcing their own laws to rein in Big Tech.
“The base’s concerns about Big Tech are colliding with Silicon Valley’s influence in this administration,” said Mark Beall, a tech-skeptical conservative who runs government affairs for the AI Policy Network, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for some guardrails on powerful AI.
Conservative populists have also targeted other aspects of Trump’s AI policy.
One is copyright law — a normally obscure issue that has become a political flashpoint in the age of AI, since tech companies train their models on vast quantities of copyrighted material.
Trump introduced his AI plan with a long, seemingly improvised riff about copyright law, agreeing with AI companies that it needs to be loosened up. Bannon is directly opposed to that idea, and has run numerous War Room podcasts objecting to AI companies’ free use of copyright material, calling it outright “theft.”
In an interview two weeks after Trump’s announcement, Sen. Hawley also used the word “theft,” telling POLITICO that congressional inaction on the issue could lead to “the largest intellectual property theft in American history.”
The senator, a longtime critic of Big Tech, has a bill in Congress to bar AI companies from training on copyrighted material without authors’ consent. He says he agrees with Trump on one point — that it’s infeasible to micromanage individual authors’ work — but wants to create a licensing regime rather than leaving it a free-for-all.
It’s not clear whether Hawley’s bill will move forward, but several other AI bills could be considered this fall, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)’s proposed “sandbox” legislation to grant AI companies regulatory waivers as they experiment with the technology, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)’s bill to protect AI-related whistleblowers from employment discrimination.
Bannon and Greene could not be reached for questions on the issue, including whether they’d try to mobilize voters against pro-AI legislation.
Wynton Hall, social media director at Breitbart, the right-populist site whose tech coverage has gone heavy on critiques of AI, said in an interview that he sees a brewing concern in the MAGA base over AI’s impact on humanity.
“There is within the conservative movement certainly a concern about child safety, mental health, all those things,” he said. He also sees AI-related job loss as a growing political issue on the right.
“The transhumanism stuff is also a real concern for conservatives,” he added.
Though that concept might seem obscure, it has already come up in Capitol Hill debates. In a June hearing of the House Oversight Committee, Republicans Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Anna Luna (R-Fla.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) all pushed back strongly against the notion of AI supplanting humans.
“AI lacks a few things — one being a soul, and also empathy. And we are not gods or God,” said Luna. She raised concerns about whether AI-driven technologies would ultimately prioritize human safety, or work against it.
“The Republican base is just not where the tech accelerationists are,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist who now leads the Alliance for Secure AI, a bipartisan nonprofit trying to push a middle-ground approach to AI guardrails.
An early organizer in the Tea Party movement circa 2008, Steinhauser thinks there will be a political backlash soon from parents and family members over the technology’s impact on the psyche, as well as morally concerning trends like creating lifelike revivals of dead people, or increasingly human-like AI companions.
His concerns are echoed by Beall, who wrote a widely circulated July essay published just before the Trump AI Action Plan titled, “A Conservative Approach to AGI.” (“AGI” refers to artificial general intelligence, or super-powerful AIs.) He argues that the industry’s race to develop superintelligent systems is a reckless attempt to build “self-creating gods” that flouts any coherent theology of man’s limitations.
So far, however, Trump’s AI plans have paid little heed to those concerns, favoring acceleration over caution. A former GOP strategist — granted anonymity to discuss the influence of their tech industry clients — noted that strongly held populist arguments often collapse against the financial and political weight of Silicon Valley.
“Traditional conservative theory is a bit of an anachronism nowadays,” the political strategist said, adding that it doesn’t always “survive a run-in with the amount of money and the level of influence buying that is now fully socialized as normal.”
It’s not clear whether AI will gain the political traction of other Big Tech issues, like the “free speech” campaign to stop tech companies from de-platforming conservative voices on social media.
Hall said the political consequences would likely be felt later — once it becomes clear how widespread and severe AI-related job loss would be.
“That’s the big trillion-dollar question,” he said.