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Naomi Klein and Illana Glaser Have a Message: Tax the Billionaires and Block Big Tech IPOs
"We cannot let the billionaire class take these kinds of risks with our future."
Nov 02, 2026
Progressive author Naomi Klein and comedian Ilana Glazer on Monday warned that America's billionaire class is taking "unprecedented risks with our future," and said US policymakers must block further Big Tech initial public offerings and mergers to prevent even more damage from occurring.
In an op-ed published by The Guardian, Klein and Glazer outlined how US billionaires have used tax loopholes, corporate mergers, and IPOs to enrich themselves at an unprecedented scale, as their wealth has grown by an estimated 40% over just the last two years.
Klein and Glazer argued that the upcoming IPOs of artificial intelligence giants OpenAI and Anthropic could be particularly risky to the economy given questions about their ability to be consistently profitable.
"It’s no secret that the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are intending to go public in the near future," they wrote. "Both of these players also had major security flaws exposed recently, and openly acknowledge mind-bogglingly huge amounts of debt."
The risk will only grow, they added, if Nasdaq grants OpenAI and Anthropic the same exception it granted to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this year by allowing their shares to be immediately included in index funds without having to wait through the one-year "seasoning" period.
"June’s highly contentious SpaceX IPO already carries great risk for regular investors," they explained. "If more speculative tech companies with staggering risk profiles are allowed to follow suit, the results will become too much for the market to bear."
Klein and Glazer said that policymakers need to intervene to put a halt to new Big Tech IPOs, and also pass a wealth tax to take away billionaires' power to spend cavalierly even as they leave working people potentially holding the bag for their failed investments.
"We cannot let the billionaire class take these kinds of risks with our future," they emphasized. "To stop these reckless IPOs we must stand together, take collective action, and push for real change."
Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs last month similarly called for AI IPOs to be halted until Congress "has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI."
Sachs noted that Anthropic executives and employees, including CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that AI could pose a threat to all human life, and he questioned why the creators of such technology should become unfathomably wealthy before such risks are understood and eliminated.
"A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment," argued Sachs. "In fact, to proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly."
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Will the AI Bubble Burst in the Face of the Working Class?
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
Nov 01, 2026
The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills.
Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: Their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40% in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.
Their robotics company Unitree's IPO just three months ago was oversubscribed 8,000 times by Chinese small investors and has lost half its value. Dong Baozhen, a Beijing fund manager, told Reuters:
And now we see the bubble bursting.
The same day (Monday) here in America Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27% of its global workforce, as it’s planning to replace them with AI. And when Anthropic (Claude) filed to go public, they disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss and some $657 billion in infrastructure deals with companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX; fully $498 billion of that is noncancelable even if the company never uses the computing capacity it’s reserved.
Things got even weirder on Wednesday, when Microsoft and Alphabet reported some striking “earnings” numbers. Alphabet burned through $9.1 billion in free cash flow for the second straight quarter. NPR’s 1A tallied up Monday’s AI deals alone at roughly $235 billion, nearly 1% of American GDP, all in just one single day.
While Wall Street has been pouring massive sums into AI companies, data centers, chips, and power infrastructure, Economist Dean Baker reports at his weekly AI Bubble Monitor that CoreWeave’s debt (the company rents computing power to the AI giants) is now considered so deep in junk bond territory that they’re having to pay 16% interest on their long-term debt to get investors to bite.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.
Most of today’s frenzy of data center and power plant construction is based on the current state of the AI chip-and-software art, but Moore’s Law dictates that over time—and not a lot of time, probably just a matter of months or years at the most—the size and power needs of these AI data centers will decrease exponentially.
Already, entire buildings filled with computers are on the verge of being replaced by a single “wafer” disc that will carry the computing power of billions of today’s red-hot chips. The Wall Street Journal broke the news with an article titled and subtitled:
The Microchip Era Is About to End. The future is in wafers. Data centers will be the size of a box, not vast energy-hogging structures.
Author George Gilder noted we’re not just on the verge of the breakthrough; it’s nearly in production:
Cerebras of Palo Alto, Calif., used the concept in its WSE-3 wafer-scale engine. The WSE-3 boasts some four trillion transistors—14 times as many as Nvidia’s Blackwell chip—with 7,000 times the memory bandwidth. Cerebras inscribed the memory directly on to the wafer rather than relegating it to distant chips and chiplets in high-bandwidth memory mazes. The company stacked up its wafer-scale engines 16-fold, thereby reducing a data center to a small box with 64 trillion transistors.
A data center—a 700,000 square-foot building drawing gigawatts of electricity and chugging millions of gallons of water for cooling—replaced by “a small box” that could be powered by rooftop solar and a good battery bank.
Meanwhile, multiple companies have rolled out AI products that can run on a desktop PC, eliminating the need for data centers altogether. Perplexity introduced one just last month with the headline:
Perplexity Computer now runs fully local on Mac.
Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?
Places booming today as AI and other data facilities and the power plants and transmission lines to feed them are being built—if Moore’s Law applies to data centers as it has proven to apply to all things digital from computers to cell phones to TVs and satellites—will soon look like Flint, Michigan when Ronald Reagan’s free trade policies began to seriously bite in the 1990s.
It sure looks like we’re seeing a repeat of previous bubbles and bursts ranging from Dutch tulips to the 19th century railroads to this century’s dot-com and home mortgage collapses. And the people running the show seem just fine with creating a world where the rich get mindbogglingly richer while working people and 401k investors are out on the street.
JD Vance’s sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Marc Andreesen, the billionaire who helped Elon recruit young men for DOGE to take apart our government, complained on a podcast this year that government workers have both civil service protections and public-sector unions, giving them “two layers of insulation against ever getting fired.”
Unions, of course, are actual democracy in the workplace that generations of workers have literally fought and died for, but these guys don’t seem to appreciate or even understand that.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a 2021 essay that as AI advances, “even more power will shift from labor to capital.” His warning points out how easily AI could dramatically increase the power of people who own businesses and tech while gutting the bargaining power of people who work for a living.
And, indeed, that’s already happening. Like Microsoft this week, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October, all after CEO Andy Jassy warned his employees that AI would “reduce our total corporate workforce.” One AI-related layoff tracker counts nearly 119,000 layoffs so far this year tied explicitly to AI automation, roughly four and a half times last year’s total.
And now the robotics business is exploding, with AI built into local machines that can assemble cars, sew clothing, clean streets, and drive you around town. It’s opened an entirely new industry: outfitting humans with sensors to track their movements to train robots to replace them.
So, if machines replace our workers, who’s going to have enough money to buy the goods and services the machines are putting out?
I grew up in a union family; my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, Michigan and was able to raise four boys with a three-bedroom home, a new car every few years, and had a decent retirement. Henry Ford increased his workers’ pay so they’d be able to buy the cars they were making.
This isn’t rocket science. Workers are also customers, taxpayers, homeowners, and parents; they’re the ultimate economic base of their communities. If AI destroys their purchasing power, we’re gnawing away at the foundation of America’s historic economic greatness.
We’ve seen versions of this before.
Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loan industry leading to predatory behavior that produced a massive crash; it cost taxpayers over $100 billion to clean up the mess (a trillion in today’s money). But Reagan also sent those banksters to prison: His regulators made more than 30,000 criminal referrals to the Justice Department, which won more than 1,000 felony convictions.
Since then, times have changed; it appears that the morbidly rich have acquired near-total immunity, no matter how badly they screw up things, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires and corporations owning judges and politicians.
Congress and Bill Clinton deregulated our banks in the late 1990s and the bill came due in 2008 when it all fell apart and millions of Americans lost their homes, families watched retirement accounts evaporate, and workers who’d done absolutely nothing wrong lost their livelihoods.
Nepo-baby George W. Bush chose to hold nobody accountable, and even let the banksters keep their billion-dollar bonuses pulled out just before all the dominoes collapsed. He made zero criminal referrals against the big banks, in a crisis that was 70 times larger than Reagan’s S&L mess.
It appears that the AI gods tech bros think that’s the new normal and are betting on getting the same or better from the Trump regime. After all, in his first term he put “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, who’d thrown an estimated 36,000 Californians out of their homes during the 2008 crash, in charge of the entire economy as Treasury Secretary.
And this time the stakes are even larger than the banking system’s freeze-up; AI is now deeply entangled with America’s military, intelligence agencies, national security infrastructure, and the rivalry with China.
And in their arrogance, they’re saying the quiet part out loud: Last November, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told a Wall Street Journal conference that her company wanted a federal “backstop” for the financing behind its data centers. When a reporter asked whether she meant a government guarantee, she answered, “Exactly.”
And pouring gasoline on this particular bonfire, President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill lets these companies write off the full cost of their data center hardware the year they buy it rather than the normal depreciation schedules every other industry in America has to stick to.
Perhaps that’s because the Trump family is so well-invested now in this, and he’s depending on tech bro billions to keep Republicans in office; Elon alone is spending almost a half-billion so far this year to that end.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are already paying. Residential electricity prices rose 6.9% last year, more than double the inflation rate, and Goldman Sachs’ analysts say they expect data centers to drive a massive 40% of electricity demand growth through the end of the decade.
The 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwest states have been hit with $23 billion in consumer electricity price increases through at least 2028, driven by AI data centers. A homeowner in Manassas, Virginia opened a $281 electric bill in January, up from about $100 the month before.
If today’s boom goes bust, who’s going to be left stuck with the bills for the half-built transmission lines, data centers, and power plants? Apparently it won’t be the morbidly rich tech bro masters of the universe, any more than it was Bush’s billionaire bankers.
None of this is to diminish the power and importance of AI. But the internet was real, too, and look what happened in the 1999-2002 period when that industry took down people’s retirement accounts while creating billionaires out of Zuck, Bezos, and Gates.
In 1983, Reagan instructed his Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commision to stop enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust and other anti-monopoly laws, leading to a decade of “Mergers & Acquisitions Mania” as was documented in Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” movie, Wall Street.
Add that to Reagan decriminalizing share buybacks and you have the perfect storm of perverse incentives that end up with doors falling off airplanes, workers and communities being screwed, and a new low standard of crappy customer service—all fed by a lack of competition. And we see that consolidation now happening in AI.
This is what happens when the people who own the machines accumulate more economic—and, thus, political—power than the people who depend on wages. It’s the old question: “Is the economy here to serve us, or are we here to serve the small number of mostly white men who control the economy?”
The AI revolution is going to force that debate back into the open.
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
If that happens, we need to be ready to force the issue of the concentration of wealth and power that grew up around it. We failed with the internet giants in 2000 and the banksters in 2008. We need to prepare—politically and economically—for the next cycle of boom and bust that’s increasingly seeming inevitable.
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Boo-Hoo! California's Billionaire Snowflakes Are Scared of a One-Time, 5% Tax!
The 22 billionaires who have spent or spoken against California's Prop 40 have seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months, yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
Oct 31, 2026
Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, are spending big to stop it.
Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40—a one-time, 5% wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200-plus billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.
In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK."
The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.
Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)
Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.
Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.
Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes—and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.
California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of September 22, 2026 and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less—just 0.07% of their wealth annually.
We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years—and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95% of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have healthcare. You will get over this one quickly.”
Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.
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'We Cannot Let History Repeat Itself': Progressive US Lawmakers Oppose AI Bailouts
"The House Progressive Caucus is ready for the collapse of the AI bubble. The rest of us should be also," said one economist.
Oct 28, 2026
As a progressive US senator warned Wednesday that Anthropic going public could leave "Americans holding the bag" if the artificial intelligence bubble bursts, The American Prospect revealed that key Democrats in the House of Representatives have crafted a resolution opposing federal bailouts for AI giants like the ones "too-big-to-fail banks" got nearly two decades ago.
The seven-page resolution obtained by Prospect executive editor David Dayen frames the 2008 global financial crisis as a result of "profit-driven financial risk-taking, fueled by Wall Street's speculative fervor and unleashed by years of zealous deregulation," as well as an example of what not to do when it comes to the booming AI sector.
"The economic harm of a multitrillion-dollar housing bubble caused by predatory lending, reckless financialization and securitization, and off-balance-sheet lending led to a massive surge in layoffs, with the unemployment rate hitting almost 10% at the trough of the Great Recession in 2009," the seven-page measure recalls. "The weak labor market persisted for nearly a decade."
Now, AI firms "hold trillions of dollars in debt, much of which is raised in opaque and unregulated private credit markets," the resolution continues. Financing terms of many "data centers as well as the costs and revenues of major artificial intelligence firms are not publicly available and... corporate borrowing to fund data center investments are multiples higher than projected revenues."
AI-related stock prices "have inflated even more than the tech giants of the 1990s," the measure notes, warning that "a collapse of an artificial intelligence bubble could have serious consequences for the economy, similar if not more significant than the end of the 1990s tech bubble or the 2008 global financial crisis."
Thus, it argues, "Congress must refuse to provide any additional funds or exceptional regulatory support to companies or financial institutions facing insolvency or financial collapse due to exposures to acute stress within the artificial intelligence market and must provide support to all harmed Americans instead."
While politicians from both parties have been ripped for their ties to Big Tech and AI specifically, the resolution explicitly calls out related failures under Republican President Donald Trump, who recently gathered industry leaders at the White House to sign a "self-policing" accord that critics said was "as dangerous as it is absurd."
House progressives' measure points out that "federal regulators have avoided applying robust scrutiny and oversight regarding enormously complicated debt and equity schemes used by artificial intelligence firms or the circular financing mechanisms involved" in the AI data center build-out.
Additionally, "the White House's artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar was personally invested in at least 449
companies" tied to AI "while pushing to eliminate government obstacles," the resolution says, "reflecting the administration's broad deregulatory focus and conflicts of interest" when it comes to this industry.
The House Progressive Caucus is ready for the collapse of the AI bubble. The rest of us should be also. No bailouts for the AI billionaires prospect.org/2026/10/28/h...
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— Dean Baker (@deanbaker13.bsky.social) October 28, 2026 at 7:53 AM
Though the resolution has not yet been introduced, Dayen reported on it less than a week before the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Trump's second term. It's spearheaded by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) and House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).
"Big Tech and Wall Street are taking enormous risks with billions in borrowed money to fuel the AI boom, despite growing warning signs of a dangerous bubble," Waters told him. "We cannot let history repeat itself. The American people should never again be forced to foot the bill for billionaires' reckless bets."
Casar, a 37-year-old former labor organizer, highlighted that "many of us, myself included, came into political life watching as many people who caused the crisis in 2008 or cheered it on weren't held accountable."
"We know that the American people were appalled at these Wall Street executives nearly two decades ago, and they're even more pissed off at these tech oligarchs today. We shouldn't be trying to make them whole," said the congressman, who also leads the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Polling released this past summer by Data for Progress found that among the "bad actors" Americans blame for the country’s concerning conditions, billionaires rank No. 1, but AI companies and social media giants are in the top 10.
The progressives' proposal "is a nonbinding 'sense of the House' measure," Dayen explained. "But it sets a marker that no bailout funds should be made available to AI companies. Casar wants the measure to be voted on early in the next Congress if Democrats take power, if not sooner, to get everyone on the record about an AI bailout."
Welcoming the resolution on social media, economist Leslie Ehrlich called it "both correct and good politics," adding, "Let the Republicans vote against it and be pro-bailouts."
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Ahead of Anthropic IPO, Warren Warns AI Giant Could Leave 'Americans Holding the Bag'
"Anthropic is saying that AI models could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. At the same time, Anthropic is planning the largest IPO in history."
Oct 28, 2026
As the artificial intelligence company Anthropic moves toward a historic initial public offering, the top Democrat on the US Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee sounded the alarm about both public safety and financial concerns in a Tuesday letter to CEO Dario Amodei.
"I write with concern following your company's disclosure that Anthropic's advanced AI models could 'pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity' at the same time that it seeks to register as a public company and sell shares in November," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
"Anthropic disclosed extensive public safety and financial risks to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of its registration process for an initial public offering (IPO)," she noted. "An IPO would provide Anthropic with broader access to the largest capital markets in the world, allowing it to raise more funding from a larger pool of investors to fuel its rapid growth."
"It will also mean that millions of Americans with retirement accounts invested in index funds will quickly become Anthropic shareholders," stressed the former Harvard University bankruptcy professor. "Public pensions are already heavily exposed to Anthropic and have expressed their concerns about Anthropic's societal risks ahead of its IPO."
According to the SEC paperwork, Anthropic plans to list on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol "ANT." Reports have suggested the company—known for its Claude models—could be valued at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. As NPR noted: "That would put it in league with Elon Musk's rocketry and AI company SpaceX, which was valued at around $1.8 trillion when it listed in June."
Warren pointed out to Amodei that "this massive influx of public capital is likely to catapult the development and deployment of your technology during a time of intense public debate and concern about the risks of your frontier intelligence models."
The senator argued that "the risks presented by this technology demand greater scrutiny before they become intertwined with the public capital markets, which could further escalate both public safety and systemic financial risks."
The "growing public safety concerns" section of Warren's letter cites details from the Form S-1 that Anthropic submitted to the SEC, as well as the CEO's public statements "calling for the need to slow down the development of frontier AI models."
"You warned that 'we still only understand a tiny fraction of what goes on inside these models' and highlighted the 'risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption,'" she reminded Amodei. "You further warned that a 'race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.'"
"It is also difficult to trust existing safety tests and evaluations of model test environments in the wake of recent incidents in which models built by frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, have broken through security controls and hacked external systems autonomously," the senator emphasized.
Such incidents have intensified AI experts' warnings and spurred calls for government action, leading to a range of legislative proposals, including in the US Congress—the future control of which will be decided in next week's midterm elections.
Warren highlighted that "in addition to the potentially catastrophic safety risks posed by Anthropic's technology, the company's launch into the public markets could inject extreme volatility and risk into the financial system, which threatens to undermine Americans' economic security."
"Anthropic is projected to be the largest IPO in history," she wrote. "Given its unprecedented size, swings in Anthropic's share price have the potential to roil the broader markets on day one, particularly for companies in the technology sector, and even more acutely for megacap companies with direct financial entanglement with Anthropic."
"Beyond the threats to the financial system that Anthropic's IPO may pose, the company's registration statement disclosures include astronomical projections supported by aggressive assumptions that require further review and due diligence," she added, digging into the company's disclosures.
Warren also sent Amodei a detailed list of questions she wants answered by November 3—before the company goes public.
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The 'AI Race' Against China Is a Dangerous, Dishonest Narrative
AI hype has merged with “China threat” hysteria, yielding disingenuous rhetoric that powers the current unregulated, breakneck AI buildout.
Oct 28, 2026
As Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington recently to meet with President Donald Trump, discussions over Artificial Intelligence were hotly anticipated as an urgent matter of national relations, as it was this past May during the previous US-China summit. Disappointingly, little of substance has come of this meeting as well, despite fresh worries over AI doomsday scenarios from industry insiders, and pleas for both regulation and international cooperation.
Once again, instead of hashing out guardrails to contain a fever-pitched “AI arms race,” the discussion revolved primarily around trade and resources. This discouraging result comes amid an atmosphere in the US in which tech CEOs and politicians claim that China winning the “race” would spell the end of Western civilization. Given the proclaimed stakes, an apparent lack of substantial AI discussion during the summit appears either as baffling incompetence, or an indication that the “arms race” threat may not be what it appears.
In reality, mounting evidence seems to indicate that the “China threat” is nothing more than a performative manipulation, wielded by tech CEOs and White House officials to justify their deeply unpopular AI program. The real threat, in Americans’ eyes, seems to be coming from the inside, as huge majorities remain concerned over data centers encroaching on their communities, AI-driven job loss, and other harms borne from the unregulated technology.
Deeply Unpopular AI Needs Justification
Pew Research reported in March of this year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI use in daily life. Gallup polling found in the spring that 71% of Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. It is only earners of $200,000 or more, according to a Quinnipiac poll, who consider AI in daily life as more good than bad. Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found last week that 3 out of 4 Americans feel that AI companies are not doing enough to ensure that their products do not inflict serious harm on society. Meanwhile, Americans are watching as companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce lay off thousands of employees, arguing that AI can step in, contributing to 80% of Americans saying they want the government to fund workforce transition programs, according to a May Harris poll.
In spite of the disturbing World Cup commercials and the endless billboards, the AI industry has a trillion-dollar messaging problem that may cast it into the “death valley” of start-ups, where profitability doesn’t arrive in time to make up for balking venture capital.
The “China threat” is a handy solution.
Business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.
This “threat” builds on a long history of Sinophobia in America, from “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, to anti-immigrant lynching, and since 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it has been combined with Red Scare hysteria. China’s economic rise in the past 50 years has come with enhanced military potential in the region, as it brought Hong Kong to heel, and began projecting power in the South China Sea and beyond. Some analysts believe we are already in a “New Cold War.”
Today, anti-Beijing rhetoric is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in Washington. And while some analysts believe that the US and China are running qualitatively different “AI races,” business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.
China’s “Existential Threat” to Democracy
Businessman and television personality, Kevin O’Leary, who is facing strong opposition from residents of Box Elder County, Utah, where he plans to build a 9 gigawatt data center, proclaimed on a CNN panel, “If you want China to lead, take over… our democracy, our free speech, how we live with technology, just stop building data centers, it’s that simple.”
Equally breathless rhetoric from Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir referred to China’s technology landscape as a “Borg-like thing that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” Alex Karp of Palantir also asserted the urgency of his own corporation being given greater leeway to operate in spite of concerns about privacy rights: “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”
The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.
This rhetoric is also the official stance of Washington. In the Trump White House’s “AI Action Plan,” titled “Winning the Race,” the authors are explicit: “As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” This type of language is evocative of the Manhattan Project in World War II, and the space race during the Cold War.
But as in those equally propagandized endeavors, the existential threat posed by Chinese AI supremacy is unclear. Advances in AI-driven operations have increased the capabilities of militaries to generate and rapidly attack targets, but visions of autonomous robotic warfare remain far away. The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.
Rhetoric of the “Race” Will Have Consequences
It is irresponsible and dangerous to use anti-China “AI arms race” rhetoric. During Trump’s last term, his anti-China narratives attempting to cover up the administration’s Covid-19 blunders had devastating impacts as violence increased against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and the “China Initiative” chilled intellectual exchanges and disrupted lives. Similar rhetoric during the Cold War led to persecution of academics, activists, and professionals during McCarthy’s Red Scare. If this Trump administration doubled down on the anti-China narrative, we may see similar repression and hate foment again—tactics clearly already in the administration’s wheelhouse.
Worryingly, it does not appear that the “AI Arms Race” will slow down any time soon. Signs are emerging that increasingly powerful AI systems are frightening both Washington and Beijing in their potential to disrupt the global economy, incentivizing the two to consider some high-level guardrails. But even with the recent PR frenzy surrounding Jacob Coxon’s “whistleblowing” against Anthropic’s lack of safety considerations, CEOs and politicians do not seem to be backing down from using China as a spur in the race—arguing to instead balance beating China with skirting AI-induced doom.
As the US economy becomes increasingly supported by AI promises and projections, a collapse of the “bubble” may even be accompanied by increased anti-China rhetoric as justification for Silicon Valley’s need for a bailout.
We must incorporate critique of this narrative into the popular resistance against AI; in the movements against data centers, AI encroachment into education, IP theft, and more.
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The University’s Soul Has Been Uploaded
As universities embrace generative AI, they are allowing Big Tech to reshape teaching and learning without first answering a fundamental question: Does this technology belong in the classroom at all?
Oct 24, 2026
Universities are making a consequential concession: allowing privately owned generative AI systems into the very processes through which students learn to read, write, reason, and exercise judgment. Their adoption is increasingly presented as inevitable. AI exists, so higher education must adapt. Under this logic, adoption is expected, while refusal requires an explanation. But technological availability is not educational justification. Before reorganizing teaching and learning around these systems, universities should answer the question that advocates of adoption too often avoid: Why should AI be there at all?
The language of inevitability obscures who is responsible. A recent Forbes headline declared, “MIT Says AI Is Forcing a Rethink of College Itself.” AI is not forcing universities to purchase licenses, revise courses, shift budgets, or surrender influence over educational infrastructure to private vendors. People make those decisions. They should have to explain and defend them. Who was consulted? What alternatives were considered? And whose interests are being served? California State University signed a $16.9 million OpenAI agreement in 2025. A statewide student leader said her association wasn't consulted; officials cited an advisory committee with student and faculty members.
A university exists to cultivate independent thought, critical judgment, curiosity, and the ability to work through difficult questions. Reading closely, developing an argument, recognizing errors, and revising one's thinking are not incidental steps on the way to an answer. They are part of what education is for. What happens when students are encouraged to rely on systems that can perform much of this work for them?
Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public.
The available research offers no warrant for treating adoption as an educational obligation. A 2026 meta-analysis of 35 studies reported moderate gains across varied educational settings. A review of 67 higher-education studies found better outcomes when AI was used within carefully structured, inquiry-based teaching. Those findings deserve consideration, but they do not settle whether AI belongs in the learning process. In the latter review, stronger results depended on deliberate human instruction, and neither review establishes that AI reliably develops lasting, independent learning or provides benefits that effective teaching without it cannot achieve.
Better assignments are not necessarily evidence of better learning. A polished paper produced with ChatGPT does not show that its author has become a better writer. Short-term performance measures tell us little about what students may be losing when they outsource reading, writing, and reasoning. Assisted performance is not intellectual development, and making learning easier does not necessarily make education better. Nor can learning-outcome studies settle the questions that institutions routinely sidestep: Who should own educational infrastructure, what student work may be collected, whose labor may be automated, and whether students and faculty can refuse participation. Those are ethical and political decisions, not matters of test scores alone.
Yet narrowly demonstrated benefits are being used to support sweeping institutional ambitions. Universities must consider training, faculty workload, verification, privacy, dependence on proprietary systems, and what happens when a vendor changes its prices or rules. Once courses depend on a platform, leaving can become disruptive and expensive. Public money finances the infrastructure, faculty labor makes it part of everyday teaching, and the resulting dependence can give vendors greater leverage over academic decisions. Public institutions should disclose the full costs, contractual obligations, data protections, and exit plans before committing resources and educational authority. These are questions of public accountability, not merely technical procurement.
For faculty, promised efficiency can mean additional labor. Professors redesign assignments, check unreliable citations, devise oral defenses, interpret shifting policies, and struggle to determine whether students have done the intellectual work being assessed. That verification work consumes time that could otherwise go toward mentoring, substantive feedback, and sustained classroom discussion—costs rarely visible in claims of efficiency. At the same time, AI is promoted to automate feedback, lesson planning, and other forms of professional judgment. Faculty are asked to help install the very systems that may eventually diminish their autonomy.
Students face another danger in the language of “personalized learning.” Systems built around continuous assessment, behavioral prediction, and linked records can turn intellectual development into an expanding data profile. Students should be free to misunderstand, hesitate, write badly, and change their minds without every misstep becoming a permanent record. These are conditions for learning, not inefficiencies to be recorded and corrected. And when students' writing, questions, and personal circumstances pass through commercial systems, privacy cannot be an afterthought. Students deserve to know what is collected, who can access it, how long it is kept, and whether they can decline without jeopardizing their education.
Universities normalize tools that make it harder to determine whether students worked independently, then turn to monitoring technologies to establish whether they did. Instead of asking whether the original technology undermines assessment, institutions risk treating surveillance as the solution.
Beyond the classroom, students face demands to “upskill” for an AI-driven economy. Employers may promote AI proficiency while using automation to cut labor costs, reduce professional discretion, and concentrate control. The political question of who controls automation and receives its benefits is being recast as an individual problem of employability. Universities should not simply prepare students to accommodate those decisions. They should equip students to ask whose knowledge AI absorbs, who benefits, and what protections workers need—including collective bargaining and enforceable rights.
Public universities owe Big Tech no duty of adaptation. Their obligation is to students, workers, and the public. They should teach about AI: its ownership, limitations, social consequences, and deployment in mass surveillance, violent and repressive policing, and warfare, as well as the environmental costs of its infrastructure. But understanding a technology is not the same as making students dependent on it. Faculty and students deserve a meaningful voice in whether it enters their classrooms, including the right to refuse. A right to refuse means little if opting out carries academic penalties or leaves students without an equivalent route through a course.
Before committing another dollar to AI platforms, universities should weigh those investments against smaller classes, tutoring, disability services, libraries, and the time and resources faculty need to teach. The burden of proof belongs to those proposing to change the conditions of learning. At stake is more than control over software: It is the university's authority over the purposes and human relationships that give education its meaning. Universities should not surrender that authority merely because a technology has become widely available.
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Jayapal, Sanders Question Zuckerberg Over Alleged Meta Interference in Brazilian Election
"It is unacceptable for any social media platform to favor one political candidate or party over another, whether deliberately or inadvertently."
Oct 23, 2026
Over a dozen US lawmakers, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Sen. Bernie Sanders, wrote to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday to demand answers about the social media giant's alleged interference in Brazil's presidential runoff election.
Leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is facing far-right Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, in Sunday's election. Lula has asked the Superior Electoral Court to probe his challenger over "improper use" of a social network and disqualify him, and Bolsonaro—an ally of US President Donald Trump—has similarly sought Lula's disqualification.
Meanwhile, US-based Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—claimed to the Brazilian court that it has adopted measures to ensure equal treatment of the candidates. But the members of Congress remain alarmed, and research released by the corporate accountability group Ekō on Friday, after their letter was sent, bolsters their concerns, showing that "Instagram's algorithm aggressively promoted pro-Bolsonaro and right-leaning content to a brand-new, politically neutral account."
Sanders, Jayapal, and 11 other Democrats in the House of Representatives stressed to Zuckerberg that "in democratic elections, it is incumbent upon social media companies to ensure that candidates receive equitable treatment and access with regards to distribution, moderation, and recommendation of campaign-related content across their platforms."
"We are, therefore, deeply concerned about credible reports of Meta platforms restricting or suppressing content associated with the Lula campaign while amplifying or recommending content associated with the Bolsonaro campaign, thereby creating starkly unequal conditions in the digital environment," they continued. "Given the critical role social media plays in political communication, it is unacceptable for any social media platform to favor one political candidate or party over another, whether deliberately or inadvertently."
"As US lawmakers who support free and fair elections at home and abroad, it is our responsibility to conduct oversight to ensure that US social media platforms are not influencing the outcomes of elections abroad," the lawmakers said. "We urge you to take immediate action to ensure that, going forward, candidates and their campaigns in democratic elections receive equal treatment and access on your platforms."
The lawmakers—including Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Maxwell Alejandro Frost (Calif.), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Mark Pocan (Wis.), Mike Quigley (Ill.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Nydia Velázquez (NY)—laid out a series of "alarming reports" from late September to mid-October.
They also noted recent events at the Superior Electoral Court, and requested "an immediate briefing on Friday, October 23" from Meta about its measures to comply with a recent order from the tribunal, "including 17 different initiatives and a human review system for presidential campaign ad accounts."
The 13 US lawmakers also requested written responses to a series of detailed questions by November 4, and urged "additional action to ensure that, going forward, candidates in democratic elections at home and abroad benefit from an even playing field on Meta’s platforms."
Separately, on Friday, with the US midterm elections less than two weeks away, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) demanded answers from not only Meta, but also Google, TikTok, and X about their efforts to stop election misinformation from spreading on their platforms to American voters.
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'Pause AI Now!' Sanders Says as US Banks Let Agents Operate in Customer Accounts
“Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system—including your bank account.”
Oct 22, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday renewed calls to pause development of artificial intelligence following reporting that unauthorized AI agents are operating inside the systems of major US banks.
Axios' Madison Mills revealed that Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and other financial institutions are "racing to contain agent risks," including "situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human's account with the user's permission and login credentials," which "goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts."
In AI, an agent is a system that can take actions to complete an assigned task, rather than simply responding to queries or generating text.
According to Mills' reporting—which cites people familiar with the matter—some agents have contacted bank call centers or appeared to take actions independently of users' instructions.
Banking executives interviewed by Mills described the problem as “horrifying," with one official warning of potentially serious consequences for customers' finances.
The stakes are particularly high, the executives said, when AI agents have permission to make purchases or transfer funds. Banks are also struggling to determine whether activity is actually authorized by customers or whether an agent has gone rogue.
"This is insane," Sanders (I-Vt.) posted on social media in response to Mills' report. "We cannot allow AI agents to go into your bank account and act independently without your authorization."
"But that is what’s happening right now," he continued. "Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system—including your bank account."
The senator added, "Pause AI NOW!"
Sanders has repeatedly warned that the race to create increasingly powerful AI systems is outpacing efforts to ensure their safety. Such concerns are mounting as profit- and ego-driven tech oligarchs race toward the "holy grail" of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human.
Earlier this month, Sanders renewed his call for a congressional ban on the development of advanced AI, citing Big Tech oligarchs’ secret preparations for a “catastrophic AI event.”
The senator has repeatedly cited pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton who have warned that superintelligent AI—a development that experts believe could come after AGI—might wipe out humanity, as well as less existential but still potentially devastating outcomes like xAI CEO Elon Musk's prediction that AI and robots could “replace all jobs."
Last month, Sanders and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced legislation to pause advanced AI development and ban the creation or deployment of artificial superintelligence. Sanders also wants a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers.
The banking story underscores the growing challenge of deploying autonomous AI systems in consequential settings before their behavior can be reliably controlled or monitored.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon last week announced a ban on outside AI agents from accessing customer accounts.
Sanders wasn't the only elected official who responded with alarm to the new Axios report.
"This is the exact thing we’ve been warning about for years," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said on social media. "AI agents with unrestrained access to your bank account and protected information. When consumer AI agents are accessing YOUR bank account or using YOUR credit card, they must be subject to fiduciary-like duties of care."
"We need to pass my AI AGENT Act to get some basic guardrails in place," Warner added, referring to legislation that would establish federal rules for artificial intelligence agents that act on people's behalf.
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) also weighed in on the report, writing on social media that "the Trump administration and GOP leadership made the deliberate decision to let the AI industry run wild."
"That was a bad political decision," he added. "And now it’s become a potentially catastrophic policy decision."
On the other side of the political aisle, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who has opposed the Trump administration's efforts to prevent states from regulating AI—said on X, "Imagine a rogue AI agent liquidating your bank account and investment portfolio."
"If you are the only victim, I suppose you could get made whole by the AI company responsible," he added. "If rogue agents liquidate hundreds of billions across millions of accounts, the AI company would go bankrupt and you wouldn’t get made whole."
The new Axios report comes two days after nationwide “Freeze AI Now” walkout protests by students, workers, academics, and others demanding an immediate halt to further AI development until the public has a meaningful say in how the technology is built and regulated.
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Big Tech Has Become the 'Ubiquitous Villain' of the 2026 Midterms
"Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place," said one Democratic strategist.
Oct 22, 2026
American voters' antipathy toward Big Tech companies has become a central theme of campaigns in the 2026 midterm elections, according to an analysis published by The Guardian on Thursday.
The Guardian noted that hundreds of midterm campaign ads attacking data centers have aired over the past two months, with both Republicans and Democrats accusing one another of being pawns of the artificial intelligence industry.
"And it’s not only data centers," The Guardian added. "The public anxiety over AI and distaste for the billionaires developing it, as well as backlash over encroaching tech like surveillance cameras, has turned the tech industry into a ubiquitous villain this election cycle."
Silicon Valley has become a punching bag for politicians even as Big Tech moguls have been throwing record sums of money to elect politicians sympathetic to their needs.
Super political action committees (PACs) "funded by tech billionaires are among the top spenders in this election cycle," The Guardian explained. "Leading the Future, formed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has raised more than $75 million to back tech-friendly candidates. [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk has sunk $366 million into Republican causes, more than he spent on the 2024 presidential election."
Much of the Big Tech money has been going toward Republican candidates this cycle, even though the industry has traditionally had close ties with elected Democrats.
Texas Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico in recent days has been trying to turn Big Tech money being spent against him into an advantage, highlighting in particular the outsize role that Musk is playing funding the campaign of his Republican rival, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
After Musk on Wednesday used his platform X to declare that "there is something deeply wrong with Talarico," the Texas Democrat quickly returned fire.
"There is something deeply wrong with a political system," Talarico wrote, "that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal US senator."
A report published by The Atlantic on Monday examined how the tech industry's embrace of President Donald Trump during his second term has given Democrats an incentive to pummel the industry, particularly when polls show a bipartisan hostility to AI data centers.
In fact, Democratic strategists told The Atlantic that data centers have proven to be a top wedge issue capable of getting normally loyal GOP voters to think twice before voting for a Republican candidate.
"Trump and his anti-AI regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Democratic strategist Rob Flaherty told The Atlantic. "They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time."
Democratic strategists started pushing the party to take a more populist approach toward the tech industry when polling data "showed surprising concern about AI" even in traditionally conservative rural districts, The Atlantic reported.
Rishi Bharwani, US director of tech regulation advocacy group Reset Tech, said much has changed since Democrats under former President Barack Obama embraced the industry as a positive force for society.
“What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire," said Bharwani, "and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing. These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety."
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