Artificial intelligence may prove to be the most consequential technology developed since the birth of the Internet, perhaps since the Industrial Revolution itself. It will influence medicine, national defense, education, manufacturing, communications, finance, scientific research, and virtually every other sector of the American economy. That makes the emerging argument over who should control AI enormously important.
The increasingly aggressive position coming from the Democratic Party’s socialist wing should therefore concern Americans across the political spectrum.
It would be inaccurate to claim that every Democrat wants government control of artificial intelligence. Democrats remain divided over AI policy, with some advocating relatively conventional regulation while others are moving toward dramatically greater government intervention. But the direction being advocated by prominent progressives is unmistakable.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed an AI Data Center Moratorium Act that would halt development of major AI infrastructure while Washington determines how the technology should proceed. Sanders argues that Americans cannot allow what he calls “Big Tech oligarchs” to make decisions that could reshape society and instead demands greater “democratic oversight.” Sanders has separately called upon leading AI companies to pause development.
Other voices are moving beyond regulation toward ownership.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has advocated public control of AI companies, going further than Sanders’ proposal for an American AI sovereign wealth fund involving government acquisition of substantial equity interests in AI companies. Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Edward Markey has unveiled an expansive “AI Accountability Agenda” explicitly framed around “Taking Power Back from Big Tech.”
These proposals fit comfortably within the broader philosophy of the Democratic Socialists of America, which advocates social ownership and democratic control of key industries and public control of communications technology.
The danger is not difficult to understand.
The choice is not between unaccountable corporations and benevolent government administrators. Corporations can become abusive, monopolistic, politically biased, or reckless. Conservatives should have no difficulty acknowledging that. Government has legitimate responsibilities involving antitrust enforcement, national security, consumer fraud, intellectual property, privacy, and genuinely dangerous applications of AI.
But government ownership is fundamentally different from government regulation.
A private AI company can lose customers. Competitors can develop better products. Investors can abandon incompetent management. Entrepreneurs can challenge entrenched companies. Markets distribute technological power precisely because nobody permanently controls them.
Government possesses something no corporation does: the coercive power of the state.
Imagine an America in which Washington effectively determines which AI systems may be built, how much computing capacity companies may possess, what models may be trained, what information those models may provide, and which political conception of “safety” must govern their answers.
That would not merely constitute economic regulation. It could become intellectual regulation.
Artificial intelligence will increasingly mediate how people obtain information. Whoever controls AI may consequently exercise extraordinary influence over what citizens read, discover, create, and ultimately believe. Giving government enormous authority over that infrastructure creates possibilities for political manipulation that should alarm conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and anyone concerned about civil liberties.
There is also the matter of China.
America is not developing AI in isolation. It is competing against an authoritarian Chinese state determined to dominate advanced computing, robotics, military technology, surveillance systems, and artificial intelligence. Even Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has warned that an American overreaction to AI could strengthen China and has argued that American leadership in the technology is a national-security imperative.
America cannot bureaucratize its way to technological supremacy.
The extraordinary American technology industry exists largely because innovators were permitted to experiment before government officials completely understood what they were building. Silicon Valley did not emerge from a federal five-year plan. Neither did the personal computer revolution, modern software industry, smartphone economy, or countless Internet businesses.
Mistakes accompanied those revolutions. Regulation eventually became necessary in particular areas. But innovation preceded bureaucracy.
The socialist approach reverses that relationship. Government becomes the gatekeeper, financier, regulator, stakeholder, and potentially owner. Political officials inevitably begin determining which companies deserve capital, which technologies deserve permission, and which risks society will be permitted to take.
Eventually, entrepreneurs stop asking, “What can we invent?”
They start asking, “What will Washington allow?”
That is how technological stagnation begins.
There is a legitimate debate to be had about artificial intelligence. AI can displace workers, facilitate fraud, threaten privacy, consume enormous quantities of electricity, create national-security vulnerabilities, and concentrate tremendous economic power. Conservatives should not pretend those problems disappear simply because markets are preferable to socialism.
But acknowledging risks does not require surrendering control of the defining technology of the twenty-first century to government.
The better American answer is competition, enforceable laws against identifiable harms, strong property rights, aggressive protection against foreign espionage, transparency where appropriate, and enough regulatory restraint to permit experimentation.
Government should police the boundaries.
It should not own the playing field.
Because the moment Washington acquires the power to control the machines that increasingly organize human knowledge, economic activity, and communication, the debate stops being merely about artificial intelligence.
It becomes a debate about who controls intelligence itself.