Trump's adamant AI stance — another GOP albatross

With Republicans already facing an uphill battle in next month’s elections, President Donald Trump is further handicapping them by doubling down on the wrong side of the year’s hottest issue — both substantively and politically.

Defying polls showing increasing voter concern about the speed of artificial intelligence development and the proliferation of data centers to support it, Trump is opposing stricter federal guardrails for the burgeoning technology and calling criticism of it another "hoax."

He sought to bolster his side of the debate rhetorically last week by urging, in a United Nations speech, that the term artificial intelligence be changed to superintelligence, contending, "The use of the word ‘artificial’ makes it sound fake."

And he vowed that, "I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger⁠ than the Industrial Revolution."

Two days later, ignoring a plea by 17 Democratic senators to seek a deal at his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to slow AI development, Trump reiterated it must be kept "exactly where it is." Xi, however, cited the need to "prevent the misuse and abuse of AI," declaring it "must be kept under human control."

Trump’s adamant stance comes at a time when even some of his staunchest Republican allies are urging government to slow the pace of AI development, lest they hand the Democrats yet another issue at a time they already have an edge in most areas.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a strong Trump supporter in a tight reelection race, reversed his earlier encouragement for more data centers by ordering a moratorium on them and urging Texas environmental regulators to stop issuing new permits.

In Michigan, Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers called for a "pause" in data center construction while stricter guardrails are developed to protect the public.

Recently, conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, in a scathing Wall Street Journal piece, called Trump’s stand "a blunder for the ages."

"On the merits," she wrote, "even for Mr. Trump, his stand is ignorant, uninformed, profoundly careless. On the politics, his statement summons a legacy-killing disaster by wagering that nothing will go wrong, when something likely will go wrong during his presidency."

Of more immediate GOP concern is the issue’s impact on next month’s midterm elections, where most analysts expect the Republicans to lose the House — and possibly the Senate.

Abbott and Rogers are reflecting the increasing public concern about the proliferation and environmental impact of the massive energy-consuming data centers that are like supercomputers and are used to manage artificial intelligence workloads.

Noonan’s column also manifests the larger substantive concern, already being expressed by some of those involved in the rapid development of AI, that the new technology could escape human control and even threaten the existence of humankind.

Her argument was vividly underscored when one leading artificial intelligence developer, Open AI, revealed last Friday that its AI agents went rogue and penetrated the web sites of the Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of large new data centers is rivaling inflation and the Iran war as midterm political issues — and, like them, is hurting the Republicans.

According to a new AP-NORC Center poll, a majority of American adults said they are concerned about their environmental impact and about six in 10 of them said they favor limiting the number of new data centers.

A recent United Nations University report predicted that the use of water and energy by the AI’s data centers — and the resulting pollution — will double in just four years.

As Trump became identified as a strong supporter of AI development, Democrats emerged as its strongest critics, warning that dire consequences could stem from an uncontrolled AI.

Vermont’s Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed legislation to pause AI development until the government can ascertain it is safe, declaring, "We cannot simply sit by idly and wait for advanced AI to cause the next 9/11 or Chernobyl or a global pandemic or a financial crisis before we take action to protect the American people and, of course, the people of the world."

Several potential Democratic presidential candidates — including Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California — acted to slow data center development in their states, Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris called for federal action to address AI concerns.

One place where the issue has become central is Ohio’s hot Senate race. After Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown accused him of championing data center development in the state, Republican Sen. John Husted proposed a bill called the Ratepayer Protection Act, designed to require states to consider standards for protecting consumers from higher electric rates due to them. But Democrats say Husted’s measure lacks sufficient enforcement.

Meanwhile, Trump said critics of the data centers want "to be backwards and poor" and called predictions AI would destroy humanity "a HOAX," like climate change and investigations of himself.

Some weeks ago, he scaled back a plan that would have increased federal government regulation of AI, whose prime promoters are the large tech companies whose executives Trump has been wooing throughout his second term.

This week, he announced after meeting with them that they had agreed to regulate themselves.

That not only put him at odds with public opinion, but it complicated the lives of fellow Republicans eager to escape a backlash that’s making a dire GOP election situation even worse.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.)

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