President Trump’s midterm convention was an attempt to dominate the political conversation two months before Election Day. But I’m wondering if we won’t look back at this week as a turning point for a different reason, one that barely came up in Dallas: the stark warnings from A.I. researchers about the existential risks of the technology they are building.
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“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who quit his job this week, wrote in an X post that went viral.
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The warning came on the heels of alarming reports about a hack that one investigator described as “more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”
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And then there was the news that Anthropic had to block possible efforts to use its models to conduct research that could have helped develop biological weapons.
Apocalyptic predictions about the power of superintelligent A.I. agents have circulated in Silicon Valley for years. This week, they seemed to break into the mainstream, jolting some lawmakers in Washington and on the campaign trail — and worrying voters across the political spectrum.
Tonight, we ask: Are our politics ready for killer robots?
Alarm in Washington
One person who isn’t worried: The president.
Trump told reporters he didn’t have “any” concerns about the risks of A.I., saying, “I have concerns that if we don’t win A.I., we’re going to be put in a very bad position.”
The vibe was different on Capitol Hill, where little has been done so far to regulate the technology’s blisteringly fast advances. Some Democrats circulated a letter urging Speaker Mike Johnson to cancel an upcoming House recess and keep lawmakers in Washington until they advance bipartisan safeguards. (Here’s a nice write-up of lawmakers’ concerns from The Wall Street Journal.)
“I don’t know whether it’s a 10 percent chance that humanity will be wiped out or a 2 percent chance — it doesn’t matter, it is much too risky,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said on CNN as he called for a ban on superintelligent A.I. “Stop it right now.”
The concern cut across partisan lines. Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a Republican, called for Congress to convene a special session on A.I. “We must be ready,” she wrote on X. “This is happening whether or not we want it to.”
Trump has largely taken a hands-off approach to A.I. regulation, inching toward more action in recent months. In June, he signed an executive order that asked technology companies to voluntarily give the government oversight of new artificial intelligence models before making them public — a move that critics on the right and left say did not go nearly far enough.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican who appears to be positioning himself to run for president in 2028, called in an interview with Politico for “substantially more regulation.” Slowing the technology’s development, though, will be impossible, he said.
“If they’re going to be killer robots,” he told Politico, “I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots.”
Scrambled political lines
Polls show A.I. to be fairly unpopular with the public (and that was before the headlines that it might wipe out humanity).
Certain A.I.-related issues had already become political hot potatoes. There is the enormous backlash to data centers. And even some red-state, law-and-order Republicans are turning against Flock cameras, which use artificial intelligence to identify and track vehicles.
Those issues have become salient, in part, because of how tangible they are. What I’m watching, though, is whether these broader, even outlandish-sounding worries about the end of civilization will shape our elections, too. That could happen if they emerge as a specific issue — or if they simply inject extra anxiety into voters who are already pessimistic.
The view from the right: “I’ve always said the data centers will be in the midterms, but the overall discussion on the oligarchs and A.I. will be a central issue in the primaries and in the general election,” Steve Bannon, who has been a loud critic of Trump’s light approach to regulating A.I., told me this afternoon.
The issue, Bannon said, is deeply animating to voters in Trump’s MAGA base and beyond — because it’s fundamentally about the concentration of power.
“They hate the data centers and they detest the oligarchs and they see exactly what’s happening,” said Bannon, who has called for a regulatory body like the Atomic Energy Commission, but for A.I.
The view from the left: On this particular matter, Bannon didn’t sound so different from Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist.
“People’s concern isn’t just that the machines are taking over,” Ferguson told me. “They’re concerned that the owners are.” He added, “The narrative around this issue plays into the biggest Republican vulnerability: that they’re not on your side.”
Some candidates on the left moved this week to blame both parties for their inaction.
“This isn’t about red team vs. blue team — politicians on both sides of the aisle have been asleep while tech billionaires take unacceptable risks,” William Lawrence, a progressive Democrat running in a battleground House race in Michigan, wrote on X.
Can He Do That?
The Republican convention (or not-really-a-convention) in Dallas that ended yesterday featured a few jarring moments: Senator John Fetterman made a heel turn. A heckler apparently called for Democrats to be shot. A jumbotron flashed a picture of the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker flexing his six-pack abs in a tiny pair of blue underwear.
But the most unexpected news came when Trump floated a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every American adult if Republicans kept control of the House and the Senate in the midterms.
The president has a history of dangling cash payments that never arrive. But is this something he could do?
Legally: Federal laws prohibit expenditures to influence voting. But, Katie Rogers reported, many legal experts believe Trump’s plan might fall within the law, since the incentive would come after the election — akin to promising a tax rebate.
Financially: It would cost more than $1.3 trillion to send $5,000 checks to each of the country’s roughly 270 million adults. The plan would most likely need congressional approval, and Republicans worried about the $40 trillion national debt might balk at the price tag.
Politically: Speaking of Republicans, some of them have already come out against the deal. “I don’t know where the money comes from,” Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina told The Times. Considering Trump’s sway over his party, though, it is possible that the naysayers would come around if he ends up pursuing the idea.
quote of the day
“No.”
That was Trump’s blunt response to Laura Ingraham last night on Fox News, after she asked whether he intended to campaign harder in the midterms than he ever has before.
“It’s never as important. Look, I’m campaigning for other people,” Trump said, shrugging off Ingraham’s questions about the midterms and his political legacy while suggesting he could simply block Democrats’ initiatives if they won control of Congress.
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Trump told the convention crowd that he was “getting a little bit tired of politics.”
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He was not, however, tired of the adulation of the crowd. He led them in a pledge “to the greatest president in the history of the United States” that they would turn out and vote in November.
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Want to know more about Trump’s blasé approach to the midterms? Maggie Haberman joined me this week to explain.
Photo of the Day
On the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, all four living former presidents, as well as Vice President JD Vance, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other prominent figures, gathered in New York City for the annual ceremony at ground zero. (President Trump attended a ceremony at the Pentagon, in part because he would not have been allowed to deliver a speech at the nonpartisan event in New York.)
Former President George W. Bush, fourth from the left in the photo above, saw his governance defined by the attacks. So, too, did Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York on Sept. 11, who is pictured on the right.
More coverage of the anniversary:
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“I will tell these stories again and again, if only to wage a private war against the inevitable erasure of time.” Read Dan Barry’s reflection on the fading memories from that day.
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Americans who enlisted in the military because of the attacks spoke about how that decision shaped their lives.
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From the archives: In 2002, The Times published a harrowing chronicle of what happened on the upper floors of the towers in the 102 minutes between the first plane strike and the final collapse.
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
The post Will the Midterms Become the Killer-Robot Election? appeared first on New York Times.
