A new advocacy group focused on building a left-right alliance to push for regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) rolled out a six-figure ad campaign Monday targeting the Washington area.
In a nod to the deep partisan divides it hopes to overcome, the two spots by the Alliance for Secure AI offer different messages for different audiences — at a time when AI regulation is one of the more contentious issues in the passage of Trump’s budget bill.
“What are the odds of killer robots annihilating humanity?” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asks Elon Musk in a clip from his podcast that airs on the right-targeted ad spot, which is running on Fox News and Newsmax.
“Likely 20 percent,” Musk responds, before a clip where Steve Bannon warns that for tech companies, “productivity” gains mean “human beings who are now tech workers eliminated.”
And in the left-of-center spot aimed at MSNBC and CNN, New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein warns that AI will be “the single most disruptive thing to hit labor markets — ever,” before cutting to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) saying “the job you have today ain’t going to be here in 10 or 15 years.”
The ads aim to add weight to a growing “strange bedfellows” left-right consensus worried about the risks of the American tech sector’s headlong rush toward ever-more-powerful AIs, founder and chief executive Brendan Steinhauser told The Hill.
Steinhauser, a Texas-based political consultant and former Tea Party organizer who ran Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) 2014 reelection campaign, told The Hill recent polling shows “the American people are with us, and they’re ahead of the politicians.”
April polling in Pew showed twice as many Americans think AI will harm them as believe it will help them. Those concerns were echoed in a March YouGov poll, which also found that a third of respondents were worried about AI causing “the end of the human race on Earth.”
The ads come out as AI becomes a yawning fault line in Republican politics. Despite Musk’s warnings about the dangers of AI, Cruz remains a major AI booster, and from his position as chair of the powerful Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has sought to keep states from regulating it — or, as he describes it, slowing its pace of development.
“We are in a global race for leadership in AI, and the winner will dominate the coming decades, both economically and militarily,” Cruz said in May, arguing that “light touch” regulation helped springboard the twin revolutions of the Internet and fracking.
In the contentious Trump budget bill, Cruz initially sought to withhold $42 billion in badly needed broadband funding from states that passed bills regulating AI — as states from Tennessee to California have done.
That move spurred a bipartisan wave of opposition. An alliance of 40 attorneys general — many of whom agree on little else — sent Congressional leaders a letter opposing the language, as did more than 260 state lawmakers. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) released a a June press call to decry a measure that they said would leave Americans “vulnerable to AI harm.”
Other opponents ranged from Sanders to Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) — members whose common thread, Steinhauser said, is they’re all “a little weird, a little radical, and principled — who will stand up to their party.”
Over the past weeks, Cruz has walked the AI supremacy language back in the face of that opposition. First, the penalties for states that continued to regulate AI were reduced from losing access to billions in broadband funding to forfeiting their share of a $500 million fund of AI infrastructure money.
Then on Sunday, a deal between Cruz and Blackburn shortened the moratorium from ten to five years, and added carve-outs for state laws targeting deepfakes, child pornography or some forms of fraud.
But the core tension remains. “You can’t say you support working people and then replace us with machines,” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said last week on the social platform X.
In an op-ed in Fox, he warned that Big Tech wants “driverless trucks crisscrossing our roads without oversight. Delivery drones flying over our neighborhoods without regulation. Fully automated warehouses and ports operated by machine.”
Meanwhile, religious groups like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) have released statements warning of the dangers of unregulated AI to Americans economic and environmental conditions — as well as to their souls.
“The Fall has adversely affected every aspect of creation, including the development and use of these powerful innovations,” the SBC wrote.
“We call upon civic, industry, and government leaders to develop, maintain, regulate, and use these technologies with the utmost care and discernment, upholding the unique nature of humanity as the crowning achievement of God’s creation.”
The threat of AI has the power to unite these groups into a new social movement, Steinhauser argued, because its challenge is so deeply “metaphysical” — a potential assault on what it means to be human.
That universal quality makes the topic so “big, existential and multifaceted,” Steinhauser said, that he hopes it will repel easy polarization.
“There’s a latent fear of being replaced,” he said. “As workers, and also as a species.”
