Left and right find common ground in rising AI unease

Washington’s latest attempt to block states from writing their own AI rules drew an unlikely alliance, stretching from Steve Bannon to Elizabeth Warren and forcing Republicans and Democrats into the same fight over who should control the technology. The immediate flashpoint was federal preemption, but the deeper fear was concentration of power, with New York Assembly Member Alex Bores warning, “It’s a coalition of almost everyone against a few extreme tech billionaires who are trying to buy unfettered power.”

That anxiety was not confined to one party. A Pew Research Center survey found Republicans and Democrats were now almost equally likely to say they were more concerned than excited about AI’s growing role in daily life, 50% and 51% respectively, a sharp shift from earlier years. Overall concern had risen to 50% from 37% in 2021, and Americans were also far more likely to think AI would worsen creative thinking and meaningful relationships than improve them.

The worries were practical as well as philosophical. Gallup polling found more workers were using AI on the job, but many of the nonusers said they preferred to work without it, cited ethical objections or worried about data privacy. That fear of displacement reached Capitol Hill in November 2025, when Senators Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, unveiled a bill that would require major companies and federal agencies to report AI-related layoffs to the Labor Department. Warner said, “Good policy starts with good data.”

On the right, the unease went beyond wages. A growing socially conservative bloc inside the Republican Party was wary of Silicon Valley’s influence, alarmed by chatbots interacting with children and distrustful of the same tech executives who had clashed with them over addictive social media products and graphic content. At the same time, the White House argued that sweeping restrictions could hand China an advantage, saying the United States had to keep AI growth fast and keep “critical security and trust standards” in place because powerful systems could be abused for cyberattacks, mass surveillance and other national security threats.

That split defined the emerging policy battle. Progressives and populist conservatives were converging on the idea that AI should be slowed, monitored and made legible to the public, while the administration and its allies were pressing for speed, federal control and fewer state-level barriers. California’s new chatbot law and New York’s pending RAISE Act showed that states were already moving ahead, and the central question was whether bipartisan anxiety could become durable regulation before the industry’s influence hardened into policy.