Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday passionately defended the use of artificial intelligence, as the rapid advancement of the technology faces increased scrutiny — and calls for regulation — in the U.S. and globally.
In a 6,500 word post timed to the announcement of his company’s new open source version of its own model, Muse Spark, Zuckerberg detailed his vision for AI, arguing the technology is not to be feared and pushing back on concerns that superintelligence could strip people of jobs.
“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.”
Zuckerberg’s vision is a direct contrast to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s, who has previously warned how AI could cause job disruption. Meta lags behind Anthropic and OpenAI, which have the most advanced AI models.
While Zuckerberg’s essay did not name Amodei or OpenAI directly, he called to broadly distribute superintelligent AI for economic opportunity. Doing so, Zuckerberg said, would provide a safety net to prevent just a handful of governments, businesses and other institutions holding too much power.
Still, Zuckerberg emphasized that the U.S. must address restrictions on AI companies in order to create the best models in the world.
“It is also important that the US and its allies lead the open source AI ecosystem that will make up a large percent of global AI use,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data.”
Zuckerberg’s essay comes amid growing concerns around AI safety. Last month, Anthropic revealed that several of its advanced models gained access to three organizations in three separate incidents dating back to April. That hack came shortly after OpenAI said that two of its most powerful models escaped a testing environment and breached multiple companies.
Lawmakers last month introduced a bill that would give the government power to restrict the use of models that could lead to catastrophic risks. While it is the latest bipartisan effort to address concerns around AI models, Congress has ultimately failed to advance broad legislation.
Zuckerberg urged the federal government to work with companies to test new models as he laid out his strategies for protecting against cybersecurity and bioterrorism.
“First, we should focus on limiting the physical production and distribution of harmful materials,” he wrote. “I expect it will be easier to regulate and control physical components than the spread of knowledge, so this is an important area of policy focus. Second, we should accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise. This includes streamlining how the FDA and other regulators test and approve new treatments.”
Zuckerberg also defended the spread of data centers, arguing that the centers represent investment into communities as he touted his company’s goal of being “water-positive, meaning that we’ll restore more water than we use in the watersheds where we operate by 2030.”
President Donald Trump this week criticized Texas for being anti-data centers, just days after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott paused industry-wide approvals until the companies provide the state with more information on things like power and water use.
“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” Trump said in a nearly hourlong sit-down interview with Punchbowl News released Friday. “I think it’s a mistake. And I’m not taking positions, I just think it’s a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community.”
Abbott’s spokesperson in a statement Friday defended the policy move as necessary because less than 10% of data centers responded to the state’s requests for them to report their power and water usage.
“Many are unaware that [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] is tracking a more than 500% increase in peak electricity demand. This unprecedented growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid,” Andrew Mahaleris said. “The Governor’s pause requires data centers to provide [Public Utility Commission of Texas] and ERCOT with the required information for them to make fully informed decisions. Simply put, Texans must come first.”
The moratorium, which Abbott announced Monday, will require state regulatory agencies to audit proposed data centers seeking connection to the state’s electric grid and find out whether they’re receiving tax breaks, how much power and water they will use, what kind of cooling they will use, what efforts they’ve made to reduce community impacts, and who owns the facilities.
Any projects that fail Abbott’s ordered “comprehensive verification and audit” should be denied connection to the grid, the governor said.
The move was in contrast to the Republican’s typical pro-business stature, underlining how the data center debate has put Texas conservatives between Trump and angry constituents in rural, unincorporated areas where The Texas Tribune has reported most planned data centers are set to be located. Texans have mobilized across the state to oppose the new developments, airing concerns that the facilities will drain local water supplies, drive up electric bills and cause noise, light and air pollution.
Abbott’s announcement came after he had previously been bullish about the industry, calling Texas “epicenter of AI development” in November when he unveiled Google’s $40 billion investment in the state that included data center facility development.
The three-term governor’s Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, has made greater oversight of data centers a key piece of her campaign.
“Abbott’s call for a ‘pause’ could be for one day – and no one buys it,” she said in a statement this week. “He’s taken millions from data center CEOs while giving Texans lip service to non-existent restrictions.”
Trump went on to say that data centers are “tremendously important for the economics.”
“For Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake in the sense that it could be bigger than oil,” he added.
Disclosure: Google and Punchbowl News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Tech companies and developers have been scouring the U.S. for places to build data centers, and they’ve been drawn to Texas’ loose regulations and seemingly abundant power supply. But even Texas can be pushed to the brink.
No popular music genre despises the present as much as country music. Through quirks of form and function, all other radio-ready music is incredibly focused on its immediate surroundings. Pop has trendiness in its very bones, and its songwriters’ striving for universality tends to create songs focused on broad, current feelings: the sharp sting of a fresh heartbreak, the effervescence of new heartbreak, the joy of dancing in this club right now.
Rap is usually made quickly by impossibly young stars for an equally young audience, so it tends toward today’s fashion. Micro-trends in production, slang and topics come and go quickly. Last month was another era. Last year might as well be prehistoric.
Country music, though, is a different animal, born out of the urban migration of the 1930s as a way to sell a slice of an idealized past on wax to newly minted city-dwellers longing for home. Sonic trends — from the slick countrypolitan in the 1970s to the neo-traditionalist 1990s and on through the trap-indebted 2010s — have come and gone. Demographics on the dial have shifted. Stars are younger and more male than they’ve ever been. But that focus on greener pastures is as persistent as the apparent blood feud between Texas and Tennessee.
The average country listener wants to have their past misremembered for them, whether it’s the Judds asking Grandpa about the good old days or Tim McGraw missing the nebulous “back when.” The biggest hits sand down the rough-hewn edges of Mama’s metaphorical front porch to up their resale value, perhaps never funnier than Luke Bryan’s bullet-point summer vacation on “Fish, Hunt, Golf, Drink.” All that cornpone Luddism floating around made Gillian Welch’s “Everything Is Free” feel remarkable upon its release 25 years ago.
The concerns of the track from 2001’s “Time (The Revelator)” are topical and immediate. Welch responds to the then-new phenomenon of online music piracy with practical concerns. How am I going to pay my bills if no one wants to pay me for my music? How do I put gas in the car right now? Nearly a decade before the launch of Spotify, Welch saw clearly that someone was bound to “hit the big score” off of the new model — it just wouldn’t be her.
“Everything is free now, that’s what they say. Everything I’ve ever done, gonna give it away,” she sings, before immediately shifting toward plans to make money elsewhere so that she can keep performing.
A quarter century on from the song’s release, the U.S. economy is overrun with people who believe that nothing should come with a price tag.
A quarter century on from the song’s release, the U.S. economy is overrun with people who believe that nothing should come with a price tag. The finance industry is dominated by private equity firms that offload the debt of their corporate acquisitions onto other companies, the better to walk away clean when those companies collapse. The biggest players in Silicon Valley are building data centers to more efficiently run copyright-infringement machines built on terabytes of pirated material.
The journalism industry was hollowed out by the same forces that sliced up Welch’s catalog, leaving few journalists to report on the graft and theft this post-payment class of billionaires are carrying out across the country. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, once a world-class newspaper, has turned into a shell of its former self following a conservative reorientation of its opinion pages and a corporate downsizing that saw over 300 of newsroom journalists laid off in February, representing about 30% of its total staff.
More recently, Louisiana officials recently inked a secret agreement with Meta to build a five-mile-long data center in the state. The New York Times eventually sniffed out the backroom deal. The local papers were too busy covering the hors d’oeuvres at Mark Zuckerberg’s celebratory luncheon.
At the same time, the ham-fisted hollowing out of regulatory agencies by the Trump administration has had predictable results. Outbreaks of new livestock diseases, parasitic produce and slower responses to global crises followed the Department of Government Efficiency’s wild budget-slashing even as Elon Musk, the man who helmed that project, is richer than anyone else in the history of earth — and he’s gearing up to throw millions into the 2028 presidential and congressional elections.
It would be a stretch to say that Gillian Welch saw all this coming. But listening back now, it’s hard not to marvel at how timeless this timely track feels. You can’t help but sympathize with her desire to skip the coming crisis in her industry. She “never minded working hard,” she sings, but she had a lot of concern about “who I’m working for.” Seeing into the future that she’d soon be asked to work for pennies while someone else got obscenely rich, she passed.
“If there’s anything you want to hear,” she says, “you can sing it yourself.”
If only we all could have opted out in a similar fashion.
Matt Long stood before the Granbury City Council at an April zoning meeting to oppose the influx of proposed data centers in Hood County, likening them to a spiritual abomination.
“I’d consider us a Christian city inside a Christian county,” said Long, a member of the county’s development commission who lives near Granbury. “As Christians, do we think that trading 2,100 acres of natural beauty for godless technological complexes is moving us closer to the creation, or further away?”
“Do we think that entering into negotiations with Google, Meta and Amazon are closer to making a covenant with God, or making a deal with the devil?” he asked the council.
Christians, Long concluded to applause, must stand up to data centers.
Controversy surrounding data center construction has roiled Texas in recent months, fostering a bipartisan coalition of opposition, particularly among rural and suburban residents. With at least 248 planned data center projects and 335 in operation, Texas is poised to become a leader in data center development.
Opposition has also coalesced around religious appeals from a theologically diverse group of residents, leaders and politicians who see data center development as an affront to their most sacred values.
Much of the opposition focuses on environmental impact and the large amounts of water and power needed by massive facilities that operate AI applications.
Clayton Tucker, a Democrat running for Texas agriculture commissioner, is a leader in the anti-data center movement. A Catholic, he wonders if data centers are akin to the apple in the Garden of Eden.
“If we take a bite of that apple of knowledge, is that what’s going to kick us out of this blue marble of Eden … that we call Earth?” Tucker said.
Agriculture commissioner candidate Clayton Tucker speaks at a rally against data center development in Texas on the Capitol grounds in Austin on July 27, 2026.
Religion isn’t solely the domain of the opposition. Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, a Republican, said he supports data center construction because “throughout history, Christians have embraced innovations that improve lives, from the printing press to modern medicine.”
“We should approach data centers the same way: embracing their benefits while ensuring they’re built responsibly,” Christian said in a statement.
For Long, biblical passages such as Daniel Chapter 2 and Revelation Chapter 13 reveal that there are spiritual implications to replacing God’s creation “with things created by man.”
The books of Daniel and Revelation, known as apocalyptic literature, have been interpreted in some theological circles as warnings about the misuse of technology — such as artificial intelligence — in ways that threaten God’s intended order and vastly increase the government’s ability to conduct surveillance.
“They’re going to be able to track where we go, they’re going to track our money. … You’re going to have to essentially stay in line socially,” said Long, who believes this generation will be judged by its response to data centers.
“I just don’t want to read that everybody complied, everybody gave in, everybody quit. I want to hear about this small contingent of people that stood on their principles, that saw it coming from a mile away, and said, ‘We’re not budging,’” he said.
Joseph Locke, a professor of Texas and American religious history at the University of North Texas, said he was not surprised that Texans were making religious arguments against data centers.
“Texans have often drawn on religion when they want to enact social or political change,” he said in a statement, adding that “the rhetoric of spiritual warfare is pretty common, especially among today’s Christian nationalists and their conservative allies.”
Long has hosted well-attended prayer meetings in his home and taken his fight online, where he is not alone. Religious arguments are a periodic feature of comments on several dozen Facebook groups dedicated to opposing data center development.
Last month, Clarendon resident Maria Miller asked members of the Texans United Against Data Centers Facebook group to pray against data centers.
Miller said she sees parallels between the rapid development of data centers and the story of the end times told in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. “It’s kind of a no-brainer,” she said in an interview.
“People of faith feel a moral duty”
Not all religiously grounded opposition sees data centers as apocalyptic or part of a larger cosmic battle between good and evil.
“People of faith feel a moral duty to make sure that people have the things they need to live lives of dignity and thriving, and so water and energy are really important for that,” said Rev. Dr. Becca Edwards of the interfaith policy advocacy group Texas Impact.
“We’re called to be stewards of creation, which means caring for the world as God does. And I think what we see in the creation story is that the world was created to be a place of fruitfulness and plenty,” Edwards said.
Locke said many Texans have drawn on their faith “to attack inequalities, provide for the needy and, yes, advocate for environmental protections.”
In addition, conservative Christians have been “generally supportive of Texas’ conservative economic and environmental policies,” Locke said.
“The oil industry, for instance, has long been wed to conservative Christianity,” he said. “Billy Graham was backed by Texas oilmen, and George W. Bush, who helped bring Texas’ religious politics to Washington, D.C., was rooted in the oil industry.”
Texas churches also spoke out against inequality during the Gilded Age — a late 19th-century period of rapid industrial growth that produced extreme wealth inequality, Locke said. Evangelical leaders “helped to organize the Populist revolt of the 1880s and 1890s” and others “urged Texans to see the sins of our economic system,” he said.
“Texas’ conservative Christian nationalism may win the most headlines, but Texas religion contains multitudes,” Locke said.
Tucker, the Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner, is a fifth-generation Texan who ties his campaign to Texas’ populist movement and focuses on issues that receive the most petition signatures on his website.
A petition on data center development has been a top performer, and as long as it remains popular, “that’s gonna be our top issue,” Tucker said while driving between anti-data center meetings, many of them held in churches.
“Had you told me a year ago that running for agriculture commissioner, I’d be talking mostly about data centers, I would have looked at you funny,” he said, adding that the facilities’ high-volume water use caught his eye.
“If we run out of water, nothing else really matters,” he said.
Matt Long shakes hands with attendees while holding a sign that says “This is insane” at a Hood County Commissioners Court meeting in Granbury on Feb. 23, 2026.
Long, who identifies as a conservative-leaning libertarian, said Tucker, although a Democrat, is “the only politician that is saying anything negative about data centers.” Older Republicans, he added, “don’t understand, like, the good versus evil fight that I believe we’re in.”
Polls show in many cases opposition to data centers transcends political partisanship. According to a June poll by the Texas Politics Project, 71% of registered Texas Democrats and 44% of registered Texas Republicans oppose data centers, with only 14% of Republicans strongly in support. National polls indicate even greater bipartisan alignment: a May Gallup survey found that 63% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats oppose data centers.
Long said he’s also found himself in a surprising alliance over data centers with some “liberal white women.”
“After the meeting … we’re hugging, and we’re all on the same page, trying to fight this,” he said.
“Humanity over injury and profit”
Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, a Democrat running for the U.S. House in Virginia, called opposition to data centers a “unifying factor” that crosses political lines. Virginia is home to the world’s largest data center market, with about 685 operating or planned, and Texas advocates have looked to the state as a cautionary tale.
“I guarantee you Jesus would be outside right now flipping tables,” Beggs said in a recent public testimony against data centers.
People “deserve a place that is safe to raise their children, and we know the harm that data centers are doing,” Beggs said in an interview. “That’s not something you can tolerate as a mother, as a citizen, and as a Christian.”
Long, who has nine children, said in testimony earlier this year that data centers create “a sacrificial zone” that negatively harms children. It is ironic, he said, that Hood County adopted a “sanctuary for the unborn” ordinance while not being a sanctuary for the born.
Hood County commissioners bow their heads in prayer at the beginning of a Hood County Commissioners Court meeting in Granbury on Feb. 24, 2026. The meeting included a vote on a moratorium that would pause construction of eight proposed data centers.
Some Jewish leaders have also based their opposition on religious grounds.
“At the core of most religious traditions is a recognition of the sanctity of life and humanity over injury and profit,” Rabbi Jennie Rosenn of the Jewish climate advocacy group Dayenu said in a statement.
Rosenn said data centers are an affront to Judaism’s most foundational teachings of “life, not death (bacharta bahayim), protect creation (shomrei adamah), pursue justice (tirdof tzedek), not waste (bal tashchit), protect the most vulnerable (shomer ger yatom v’almanah), and ensure that life can continue l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation).”
“If this sounds like Judaism’s greatest hits, it’s because it is,” Rosenn continued. “That is how fundamentally the explosive growth of data centers across our nation threatens the values we — and many other people of faith — hold most dear.”
Jane Bannor, treasurer of Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community, a progressive advocacy group, said Unitarian Universalists around the nation are calling for moratoriums on data center construction based on a “respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part.”
“We want to see businesses benefit not just corporate shareholders, but also the surrounding population,” Bannor said.
Tucker hopes religious-based opposition can affect the data center debate in Texas.
Faith appeals carry extra weight, he said, “when you can kind of tie [data centers] to those stories that are foundational to Christianity, that are foundational to a lot of our worldviews.”
(Mark Weinberg / Food52)Flowers are silhouetted against lights from the Stargate data center in Abilene on May 2, 2026.
This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.
Disclosure: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Meta and University of North Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.
It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.
Login
