A new front has opened in the politics of artificial intelligence, and it’s coming from inside President Donald Trump’s own coalition.
Amy Kremer, a former Tea Party leader who helped organize the rally preceding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, has emerged as one of the most prominent conservative voices pushing back against Silicon Valley’s influence over AI policy, reported the Washington Post. As chair of the advocacy group Humans First, Kremer is attempting to channel the same populist anger that once fueled the Tea Party into a movement against AI labs and the tech billionaires who have aligned themselves with Trump.
“These people do not care about conservatives, about Republicans, or about the American people,” Kremer said. “All they care about is power and control and money.”
Her group is planning anti-data center rallies across five states next month, explicitly invoking “the spirit of the Tea Party.”
Polling shows a majority of Americans have grown wary of the AI boom, citing fears over job losses and the proliferation of energy-hungry data centers in their communities. That unease has created an unlikely alliance between Kremer’s conservative network and progressive AI-safety advocates — including Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman, who compared the coalition to the French resistance uniting ideological opposites against a common threat.
For Trump, the dynamic is awkward. His administration has largely taken a hands-off approach to AI regulation, shaped in part by Silicon Valley figures like investor David Sacks, who dismissed Humans First as “a censorship power play dressed up in safety language.”
“While everybody wants to make it about President Trump, it’s really not about President Trump,” said Kremer, who still believes the 2020 election was stolen and backs much of the MAGA agenda. “It is about our lawmakers doing their damn job.”
Yet conservative pressure has already forced changes. The White House revised an executive order last year after MAGA-base backlash, and Kremer’s coalition recently sparred with Sacks over how aggressively to regulate AI models’ hacking capabilities.
When Trump ultimately signed a pared-back oversight order, Kremer still claimed it as a win — evidence, she said, that “you can promote American innovation without sacrificing American values.”
The fight has also exposed strain within Humans First itself. Originally conceived as a bipartisan coalition, the group split its left and right wings after organizers concluded the two sides spoke different political languages and needed separate strategies to be effective.
The White House, for its part, insists it can manage the tension. Spokeswoman Liz Huston said the administration remains “committed to securing American dominance in AI” while creating opportunities for workers — a balancing act that may grow harder as Trump’s own base keeps pushing back.
Kremer got involved with the issue after hearing about protests over data center construction in 2024, and she said the anti-elite energy reminded her of the animating spirit of the Tea Party movement.
“If you had told me a year ago I would be doing this, I would have told you to put down the crack pipe,” Kremer said.
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