Americans Hate AI. Will the Democrats Join Them?

Here is a clear and simple way for Democrats to transform their party’s brand to appeal to working Americans who are being crushed by high costs and angry at a system that feels rigged against them. Because, as electorally compelling as an anti-AI position is today, it will become politically essential in the years ahead—for three important reasons.

First, there is the likelihood that the AI industry is building up a bubble that, when it bursts, will take down the global economy. OpenAI is currently valued at $500 billion, and is laying the groundwork for a $1 trillion initial public offering. This valuation is speculative, rather than based on the company’s earnings, which are abysmal. In the first half of 2025, OpenAI made $4.3 billion in revenue and posted a net loss of $13.5 billion, a ratio that is only getting worse as its capital expenditures continue skyrocketing. Even more infuriating, AI billionaires seem to be purposefully inflating this bubble with sketchy circular financing strategies, in which companies like OpenAI receive billions of dollars in investments from chipmakers, cloud computing companies, and other Big Tech corporations, which they then send back to those same companies to pay for chips, computing power, and other services.

When this thing pops, it won’t be the filthy rich scammers behind the bubble who will lose out. It will be regular people: One former International Monetary Fund chief economist estimates that a crash could wipe out $20 trillion in wealth held by American households. Meanwhile, as Altman’s quote at the top of this essay foreshadowed, AI billionaires are already maneuvering for taxpayers to bail them out of the crisis they are willfully creating, with OpenAI’s chief financial officer recently suggesting that a government loan guarantee might be necessary to fund the investments needed to keep the company afloat. It’s pretty easy to predict how all of this will go over with the voting public.