AI was supposed to make our lives better. Instead, it’s made many of us scared and angry. Communities are protesting against the building of new data centers — the warehouses of IT equipment powering the AI buildout — across the country, and increasingly they’re winning. And polling shows most Americans think AI is moving too fast.

So how did public opinion on AI curdle so quickly? Jasmine Sun, who reports on the industry from San Francisco, argues that the backlash treats AI less as a technology and more as a political project. “The debate was not about like, is ChatGPT useful to me?” Sun told me during a taping of Vox’s The Gray Area. “The debate was actually something more like, there are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires…coming into my city, coming into my life and changing it without having any sort of democratic input?”

Filling in for Sean Illing, I talked to Sun about the rise of “AI populism,” the parallels with the Industrial Revolution, and how the backlash could crash into the 2028 presidential election. 

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

You’ve been writing about a phenomenon you call AI populism. How would you define that? What is AI populism?

I define AI populism as a worldview where AI is not seen as an ordinary technology, but specifically as an elite political project to be resisted. I came to the term while thinking about the AI backlash and the reasons people are increasingly anti-AI — whether that’s LLM slop, whether that’s Waymos in their city, whether that’s a new data center project. One thing that occurred to me was that a lot of times the debate wasn’t about whether ChatGPT is useful to me, or whether Waymos are safer than a human driver. The debate was actually something more like: There are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life, and changing it without any democratic input.

When I talk to people who are opposing AI in various ways, they seem more concerned with this concentration-of-power, anti-elite dimension — which is where I take the word “populism” — rather than classic AI safety concerns, which are more about the technical characteristics that might introduce risk.

You wrote a piece that touched on some of this but went to a darker place — “AI populism’s warning shots” — and you wrote about actual shots. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was targeted by a Molotov cocktail and a shooting within the span of a couple of days. There was an Indiana councilman who voted for a data center and woke up to gunshots at his home and a note reading “no data centers.” Why do you think of those incidents of violence as warning shots of something to come?

It was pretty scary. I’m no Sam Altman fanboy, but it’s terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people’s worries about AI. One factor is that we’ve been seeing a rising wave of political violence and support for political violence in the US, especially among young people, over the past few years — the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, the Charlie Kirk shooting. Increasingly, a lot of disaffected, maybe nihilistic young people are turning toward political violence as a way to express political beliefs they don’t feel they have other channels for. Or maybe that person is just unwell. But I do expect to see more of it, because my theory of political discontent is that if people feel they have institutional channels to bargain for their rights — if they feel the democratic process is working, or they’re part of a union and believe their union leader will go bargain about how automation shows up in the workplace — they’ll most likely go through those channels.

When it feels like the official channels aren’t working, opposition becomes much more diffuse and volatile. That’s part of why, in creative communities, you’ll see people witch-hunting each other over AI use. I think we’ll see more political violence against people seen as AI leaders, or as supporting AI leaders.

That’s really scary.

Yeah, I’m quite worried about it. But again, my sense is that it comes from a feeling of — what else is there to be done, when you have this level of concentration of wealth and power, and there’s no democratic input right now into how AI is regulated or built?

It’s like a jump straight from complaining at your community meeting about the data center to an act of violence.

I was talking to some friends about this. During the 20th century in the US, there was a wave of factory mechanization and automation, but unions were really strong — often when a company said, “We’re going to bring in these machines,” they’d sit down with the factory union leader and say, “Okay, you can bring in the machines, but we’re going to couple that with a wage increase,” or a 35-hour workweek, or earlier retirement. There was a channel to make a deal about how automation would show up in your workplace. That meant people were more likely to accept it as something lifting all boats. I don’t think that’s happening now — most of the industries affected by AI aren’t organized in labor unions, and the democratic channels are questionable at best.

It’s like when people have agency to be part of the transition, the process goes a lot smoother. Is there a historical analogy for a technological change that didn’t allow for input from the people involved? I’m thinking of the Luddites.

The Luddites are a good example. When the automated looms were introduced, there was a lot of violence against the looms. The book I’d really recommend here is Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap. He’s an Oxford economist who studied a ton of historical examples — in Europe, in China, all over the world — including the Luddites and 20th-century automation. His central question was: In what contexts do workers successfully stop automation, and in what contexts do they allow it to be introduced? How does the political environment, or the balance of power between people and their leaders, change the outcome? He found that when automation was introduced alongside social welfare policies — a higher minimum wage, some form of redistribution — people were much more willing to accept it, which is fairly rational.

I want to talk about Silicon Valley’s understanding of this backlash more generally. You’re painting a pretty dark picture, and you’re right in the belly of the beast in San Francisco — I’m sure you talk to people involved with AI every day. Is there a moment when it clicked for them that this backlash is real and something they have to take seriously? Or has that happened yet?

I’ve definitely noticed a huge difference, over the past six months, in how seriously people in Silicon Valley take the AI backlash.

Like what?

People just talk about it more. I’d bring up AI populism to people last year, and they’d normally say, “It doesn’t matter — technology always introduces some discontent, people get annoyed but they get used to it, like the internet.” That was the standard reaction last year. Not anymore. I think part of the reason OpenAI and Anthropic have felt pressure to introduce economic policy proposals around job automation is that they’re seeing how worried people are. The data center moratoriums and the broader data center backlash have been surprising and meaningful in getting AI leaders to recognize they have both a messaging problem and an actual problem with the product and the technology they’re introducing.

A lot of the increasing opposition to AI in Washington has caused people to see this too. At first, Trump — as you mentioned — was very pro-AI. He and David Sacks were accelerationists; they wanted AI to go faster and to block attempts at regulation.

He was the AI czar.

“The moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.”

He was the AI czar — he’s no longer the AI czar. But it turned out a lot of other constituencies, both on the left and the right, were pretty opposed. For example, Trump and David Sacks tried to introduce a big federal bill that would preempt all state-level AI regulation — no state could regulate AI for 10 years. They tried to sneak it into a big omnibus bill so no one would notice. But members of Congress realized it was happening, and — whether for kid-safety reasons or frontier-safety reasons — people said, Wait a second, the idea of preventing any state from regulating AI for ten years is crazy. A lot of people organized in Washington to successfully stop that preemption. I think that showed the scale and bipartisanship of a coalition that was very keen to make sure it stayed possible to regulate AI was underestimated. As a result of all this — the moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.

China is our big competitor in the AI race, and it certainly has all the conditions for a populist pushback to AI — youth unemployment is really high, and AI technology is in some ways more advanced at taking over real-world jobs. I was watching a video about fully automated factories and a robot pharmacist. You’re one of the rare American tech reporters who gets to spend time in China, and you wrote a piece that surprised me — you found there wasn’t really a populist backlash to AI there. Why not?

I was really interested in this question, and I was finishing my New York Times piece while in China for a few weeks, talking to both AI people and non-AI people. The main reason there’s not a big populist backlash in China is that there isn’t a lot of social unrest or populist backlash against anything — the entire MO of the Chinese government, the No. 1 priority, is domestic social stability. Any whisper of protest gets shut down; that’s why they have such strong speech controls. So one factor is that China doesn’t have much of a culture of resistance in general, whether in workplaces or politically. I’m not saying no one dissents — but it has a cultural effect too, because people don’t see it as useful or as an option. When I ask family members of mine in China about AI, sometimes they’re annoyed about specific things, but fundamentally, the idea of opposing AI is seen as almost unimaginable.

The other thing about China is that if you’re middle-aged there, you’ve lived through so many political, economic, and technological revolutions in your lifetime. When I was a little kid visiting Shanghai in the mid-2000s, there were no high-speed trains — now China has some of the best high-speed rail systems in the world. Technology has always gone hand in hand with dramatic economic advancement, with being lifted out of poverty. The modernization process has been aggressive and disruptive, but it’s not something the party has offered opportunities to resist, and it’s something most Chinese people still see as an inevitability that was mostly good for most people — because incomes did increase by dramatic amounts alongside the technological change. So I think people have a similar attitude toward AI: It’s much less about “Can I stop the AI wave?” and more “How can I take advantage of the AI wave to get ahead economically?”

We were just talking about this deep pessimism about what technology can bring us here in the US. I think a lot of people look around and think: We don’t have a cure for cancer yet, but we’ve sure seen our lives get worse in a lot of ways because of technology, social media, whatever. That pessimism probably fuels the backlash to AI, the skepticism about whether it can ever deliver on its promises. And that experience just isn’t the same in China, or probably much of the rest of the world, where technological progress has been faster and more concrete in people’s lives.

My 90-year-old grandfather said he’d love an elder-care robot to help him do tasks around the house so he doesn’t have to rely on his kids — he wants more freedom and mobility. It’s seen more as a tool to help individual goals. Even with the robot factories or pharmacies — one thing that struck me visiting a robot pharmacy was that the PR people happily said, “Yep, we’re doing these robots because human workers take too many smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and take too long.”

You’d never say that in the US, but they’re probably thinking the same thing — they just don’t say it. The other thing they mentioned is that this lets the pharmacy operate 24/7, because a lot of people need medications in the middle of the night and want to order via the DoorDash equivalent. There was actually a labor shortage before — Chinese workers weren’t willing to work night shifts — so these pharmacies are offering real consumer surplus. A significant percentage of orders come in overnight, when no other pharmacy is open. And with the factories, part of the issue is that Chinese workers, especially young people, don’t want to do factory work anymore.

“I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation.”

That anecdote gets at the promise and peril of AI, and the role of the backlash movement — which I’m still wrestling with how I feel about. On the one hand, I want to live in a world where cancer gets cured, where we live in an era of abundance, where things are cheap and easy to make because factories can run all the time with machine workers who don’t require anything — I want the future we were promised, of flying cars and everything working well.

But I also don’t want to lose my job, or see humanity wiped out by an angry machine god. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen yet, it’s hard to work out my own feelings about the pushback here in the States — what’s appropriate, and what’s holding us back from real advances in our lives.

Totally, I agree. I like Waymos — I think they’re safer, and I’d prefer a safer robot car driv[ing] me around instead of me driving. I’m not a good driver; no one should let me drive. So I wrestle with some of the same things.

To close out the conversation — let’s come back to the United States. AI populism is brewing as a political force. We’ve seen it show up in a couple of races so far, but it’s early. We’ve got the midterms, then the presidential election. How do you think it’s going to affect American politics this November, and in 2028?

My sense is that this November, it’s going to be more about state and local races where AI really shows up. I’m going to spend some time in Michigan and Wisconsin this summer touring some of the data center sites facing the most opposition — those states also have contested governor and Senate races where AI and data centers have become a core issue, so I’m interested to learn more there. I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation — especially if we start to see some of the employment impacts people are expecting. As soon as we see something like a 2 percent rise in unemployment, if that happens, I think people will be very upset, and we should expect a ton of focus on the issue.

The other thing I’ll note is political opportunism — you’re already seeing a bit of this, where politicians are likely to raise the salience of AI above where people might ordinarily care about it, because it’s become a convenient boogeyman. It polls so poorly, people are so anti-AI and anti-data-center, AI billionaires are so unsympathetic, that no matter what your policy program is, AI is a great reason to push it. I think a lot of politicians who are being clever about this are going to move AI to the center of the conversation, raising its salience to manufacture urgency for proposals they’re already excited about. That’s definitely something I’m watching for 2028.

It’s been just over a year since a shooter in Minnesota attacked two Democratic state lawmakers and their families in their homes — killing state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, while injuring state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. This “night of terror” stunned the political world: the shooter had a hit list and intended to carry out more assassinations of state elected officials, according to federal prosecutors.

Only a couple of months later, Charlie Kirk, the conservative founder of the Turning Point USA student political organization, was fatally shot at a campus event. As young and politically engaged Americans watched footage of his killing travel across social media, many worried that civic life would never be the same — and whether it was even safe for them to participate.  

“It was terrifying and it was horrible and I will never forget where I was when I heard the news of Charlie Kirk,” Katie Fire Thunder, a 26-year-old Democratic member of the Montana House of Representatives, told me recently. 

At the time of Kirk’s death, the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe member was preparing to enter public service herself — she’d go on to be appointed in December 2025 to replace a retiring state representative after years of political organizing and activist work — and was suddenly pondering if it would be worth it.

It was not the first time she’d had the thought. Growing up, she was well aware that public officials faced violence — whether at a community event, or a baseball practice, or at their home — even as she was drawn to the idea of service.

“Strangely, I always had a fear when I was little of being assassinated — I don’t know what it was, but I remember telling my mom, ‘I think I want to be a judge or an attorney, but I’m too scared that someone would get upset at me and try and come after me and shoot me’,” she told me.

Yet the calling to pass policy and engage communities won out. She’s now running for a full term in office — and wrestling with what the future will hold for her as polarization and political violence seem to be reaching new heights in tandem. 

“Now being an elected official, I’m really like, ‘Okay, what was little Katie thinking?’ And I’m really trying to process that,” she said. 

In conversations with young politicians and public servants, people in both parties described going through a similar journey. They feel a calling to change the status quo, an imperative to serve their neighbors and help the marginalized, and a drive to replace the aging establishment. But in addition to all the other challenges of politics — poor pay, demanding work schedules, nonstop fundraising — they’re increasingly grappling with the risk of violent retribution.

These fears are already shaping the next era of politics — changing how leaders behave, how they engage with constituents, and whether they run at all. In ways subtle and loud, the costs will be borne by all of us. 

Young legislators are balancing two clashing priorities

Security challenges — in the shadow of the Hortman and Kirk killings — dominated discussions at a gathering of Gen Z and millennial state lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill.

The four-day event was organized by Future Caucus, a bipartisan political organization that supports rising young lawmakers. Speakers and panelists discussed ways elected officials can modernize legislatures, craft policy, and exchange tips on being young and in office. 

But a recurring question hung over the room: Who even wants to run for public office these days? And what’s preventing a new generation of leadership from sticking with the job once they’re in?

Security was tight this year, just like last year’s Future Summit, which took place just days after Hortman’s killing. Attendees weren’t advertised before the event, guards buzzed around elevators and conference room entrances, and scheduling and programming was not released in advance, including to news media. 

These preventive measures, combined with panel conversations about the trade-offs of public service, emphasized the struggles these young politicians from both parties are facing: balancing openness, accessibility, and idealism with the reality that the very efforts they make to organize and participate in their communities may put their digital and physical safety and security at risk.

“Most electeds have to use social media in order to be successful and it also opens us up to critical attacks from people whose identities we can’t often verify,” Tiara Mack, a 32-year-old Democratic state senator from Rhode Island, told me. “We have to be able to reach a broad audience, which also means a broad audience can reach us.”

Since first being elected to the state legislature, she has received countless death threats, bigoted verbal abuse, and a terrifying episode of doxxing a couple of years ago: after a video of herself twerking in support of reproductive rights went viral, her home address and the floor plans of her apartment were posted online.

“When I had my floor plans leaked and when I had bomb squad dogs come to my home, circle my building to make sure that there were no bombs — very few people know what that experience is like,” she told me.

The incident caused her to reconsider whether her political career was worth continuing. Instead of leaving public service, though, she and her colleagues looked together for ways to feel safer and more in control. But these measures often come with sacrifices, including keeping constituents at a distance at a time when young voters frequently want more engagement, more access, and more authenticity from their leaders. 

Though she uses Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and Facebook actively, Mack draws a line at indulging in parasocial relationships with followers who she doesn’t know offline. She and her colleagues employ a “post-and-ghost” policy online now: publishing content online and then deliberately not reading or replying to the comments. She doesn’t advertise event locations in advance, only sending out addresses after RSVPs are submitted. She doesn’t post her location online until after she has left a place, and she tries to keep a polite and politically neutral tone online now. 

Most shocking to herself — and particularly the version of herself who first ran for office in the pre-pandemic era — is her rethinking her stance on carrying a firearm.

“That’s now a conversation I’ve had with some of my colleagues, who are grappling with what it would mean for me as someone who sponsored gun safety legislation to pursue a concealed weapons permit,” Mack told me. “And it’s a hard conversation, but I think it’s become more necessary and more and more people and women of color that I know personally are having that conversation, including myself.”

On the policy front, state lawmakers have discussed new security rules, some relevant campaign finance reforms, and mutual assurances to tone down rhetoric.

Speaking during a Future Summit panel, 35-year-old Minnesota state Rep. Isaac Schultz, a Republican, shared some of the hard lessons learned from last year’s killings. The state capitol used to have an open-door policy — “we’re a state that believes in high-contact politics,” he said — but weapons screenings now happen at the two building entrances. The Minnesota state patrol and local law enforcement now have a dedicated communications system with the sergeants-at-arms of each legislative chamber — a “massive change” from before the killings, which revealed the poor channels of communication that existed.

“We had colleagues on a hit list who didn’t have local law enforcement at their homes for over 24 hours,” Schultz said. “They were in their homes hiding. … That’s a trauma that remains.”

Minnesota and 24 other states have now passed laws to allow campaign funds to be used to reimburse or cover the cost of camera and home security systems, most of them after the Minnesota shootings. Future Caucus itself offers a discounted membership to home and digital security services, as well as some in-person security services for special events.

“State lawmakers do not have the tools that Congress has in order to keep themselves safe, but it’s just as important,” Mack said. “Cameras only do so much to keep individuals safe. They’re oftentimes a way to check after the fact. … There still need to be more robust conversations about how we keep our physical statehouses protected.”

But hearing from these lawmakers themselves, it’s hard to shake the sense that these measures are all, to an extent, stopgaps when polarization and radical thinking, including around political violence, are growing more popular, acceptable, and widespread. The reaction to the last year of killings only underscored the threat: Charlie Kirk’s death inspired conspiracy theories on the right and cruel mockery on the left, while a US senator made light of the Minnesota shootings on social media and blithely stoked rumors about the motive.

The threat of violence is changing how politics operates

According to Future Caucus’s own research, political violence egged on by hyperpartisan rhetoric is now a defining obstacle for both state legislators and those aspiring to hold public office. 

“Combined with structural and cultural barriers, they threaten lawmakers’ ability to effectively serve their communities,” Reed Howard, Future Caucus’s chief strategy and public affairs officer, wrote in a 2025 report detailing reasons young legislators end up leaving public service altogether. “Even as many Future Caucus members view public office as temporary service rather than a long-term career, it is essential that they have a fair opportunity to be productive and impactful.”

They aren’t alone in these experiences. Some four in 10 state legislators, and one in five local officeholders, reported experiencing threats or attacks since 2020, according to a series of surveys completed in 2023 by the Brennan Center for Justice. Significant shares of state legislators reported then that the seriousness and rate of abuse and harassment they have received has increased in the time they’ve been in office.

Elected officials who reported more physical threats tended to be women and nonwhite, while Republicans tended to be more likely to say the severity of abuse has increased. And since the report, “swatting” — hoax calls to police departments to trigger a show of force at a home — have continued to be a constant threat: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were both recent targets.

But the common thread is that lawmakers themselves are worried that more aggressive forms of rhetoric and politicking will become accepted as the new baseline even as more violent incidents occur. Particularly for younger legislators, who may lack a steady financial base, may be trying to start families, and may be trying to juggle other full-time jobs, these security concerns compound the challenge of public service. 

“Especially with young people, they are seeing it way more firsthand than any other generation,” Fire Thunder said. “And that is having impacts in ways that we may not be seeing yet. It’s a fear tactic of: If you are running and you are standing up and being vocal on these issues, we are going to come after you.”

Fire Thunder’s most recent run-in with a serious potential threat happened not too long ago: A disgruntled citizen showed up at a public comment session her interim legislative committee was hosting, went on a conspiracy-laden rant, and threatened a trans legislator on the committee.

“We did not have security because it was not the actual committee hearing, but in a moment, I realized that this person could have had a weapon, could have had a gun, and just point-blank shot one of us in that room,” she told me. 

As she embarks on her first full-term campaign this year, Fire Thunder told me her campaign is preparing not just to engage and rally her community, but also for inevitable threats to her life. Her campaign manager frequently reminds her, “What is our plan? What is our safety plan?” between events. She’s learning to live with that cloud, but she also worries what the country will lose if others decide it’s all too much to justify getting involved.

“The biggest negative impact of it isn’t even on me,” she said. “I don’t want other young people seeing the threats and things that I’m getting to discourage them.”