New Bernie Sanders AI Safety Bill Would Halt Data Center Construction

Dozens of cities and counties crossed the US person introduced section moratoria connected information halfway improvement successful effect to section pushback. At slightest a twelve authorities legislatures—in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have introduced state-level moratoriums this year.

But Sanders’s measure marks a important departure from galore of these pieces of legislation. The caller measure focuses not lone connected the biology and assemblage impacts of information centers, but connected AI information arsenic a whole. Since his announcement successful December, Sanders has been outspoken astir the imaginable dangers AI poses to society, peculiarly to workers.

“It makes consciousness to maine that his measure is going to absorption chiefly connected that aspect,” says Mitch Jones, the argumentation and litigation manager astatine Food and Water Watch, an biology watchdog radical which has advised Sanders’s bureau connected the moratorium. Food and Water Watch besides convened the December missive from progressive groups.

Pew’s polling recovered that Democrats are much apt to presumption information centers negatively—but it’s not conscionable nationalist progressives raising concerns. Before Sanders voiced his absorption to information centers, immoderate salient Republican and MAGA politicians, including typical Thomas Massie, legislator Josh Hawley, and then-representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, were already vocally questioning the information halfway buildout. Last month, Hawley and Democratic legislator Richard Blumenthal introduced a measure to insulate customers from energy complaint hikes owed to information centers. In December, Steve Bannon, 1 of the astir influential anti-AI voices successful Washington, hosted a conception connected his War Room podcast called “Data Centers Are Devouring Public Land.”

Many of the bills introduced astatine the authorities level were sponsored by Democratic politicians. (Food and Water Watch helped trade the New York bill.) Bills successful immoderate states, including Oklahoma, were introduced by Republicans; Georgia’s measure had some Democratic and Republican cosponsors.

Florida politician Ron DeSantis has been particularly outspoken connected the imaginable harms from some information centers and artificial intelligence. “I don’t deliberation there’s precise galore radical who privation to person higher vigor bills conscionable truthful immoderate chatbot tin corrupt immoderate 13-year-old kid online,” DeSantis said astatine an AI roundtable successful February. In December, DeSantis endorsed authorities that would person established a measure of rights to support consumers from imaginable harms from AI, including prohibiting minors from interacting with AI chatbots without parental consent, arsenic good arsenic a information halfway connection to portion subsidies from tech companies and prohibit information centers from raising energy bills. The resulting AI measure of rights authorities passed the authorities Senate, but died successful the House.

Both the White House and Big Tech companies person acknowledged that the propulsion to physique retired information centers suffers from atrocious nationalist optics. In March, representatives from apical information halfway developers and AI companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, gathered astatine the White House to motion a nonbinding statement intended to marque information centers wage “the afloat outgo of their vigor and infrastructure” and support consumers from complaint hikes. “Data centers … they request immoderate PR help,” president Donald Trump said astatine the event. Experts told WIRED that the statement signed astatine the White House was mostly symbolic, and that immoderate of the cardinal aims of the agreement—including having information centers sorb immoderate further costs to customers’ bills—are mostly retired of some the White House and tech companies’ hands.

“A moratorium would bounds net capacity, dilatory captious services, destruct hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, drain billions successful section taxation revenue, and rise costs for American families and tiny businesses,” Cy McNeill, the elder manager of national affairs astatine the Data Center Coalition, an manufacture group, told WIRED successful an email. The industry, McNeill says, “remains committed to moving with communities, local officials, authorities and national policymakers, and the Administration to guarantee the continued liable improvement of this manufacture portion protecting families and businesses.”