AI Moral Panic Demands Leadership, Not Pandering

        The midterm elections are right around the corner, and both parties are about as popular as a Monday-morning visit to the DMV.

        The time-tested solution? Find a scapegoat, go negative, and blame the other side.

        This year the weaponized bogeyman is artificial intelligence.

        Many Americans are falling for the anti-AI information operation. They shouldn’t.

        A new poll from Politico has the grisly details: 63% of Americans think AI has the potential to “destroy humanity.” A majority of both Democrats and Republicans now think AI could herald the apocalypse.

        That’s quite a sea change in less than a year. In December 2025, a poll from Navigator Research found Americans split roughly equally among those favoring data centers, opposing data centers, or ambivalent.

        It’s not hard to figure out what happened.

        Days before the new Politico poll, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stressed the same existential stakes, arguing AI industry titans “owe it to humanity to try” to slow down the Frankenstein monster they’ve unleashed on the masses.

        OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a “sociopathic lack of concern” for humanity, according to a loose-lipped company board member.

        The Trumpy Elon Musk is calling for an industry slowdown too. Apparently, the world’s wealthiest man isn’t above some anticompetitive regulatory capture.

        AI industry leaders seem to have settled on a message: Our product is going to kill your job, and it might end all of humanity, but trust us and do what we say anyway.

        How compelling!

        It’s not often that you see industry leaders fan the flames of a moral panic ignited by their own product. Harvard Business School should offer a case study on how to not market and sell one’s wares, starring Amodei and Altman.

        Unsurprisingly, given the polling, prominent figures across the political spectrum have found common cause on AI regulation. Earlier this week, Soviet Union-honeymooning communist Bernie Sanders and MAGA maestro Steve Bannon spoke at the same anti-AI confab in Washington, D.C.

        Support for AI, and especially data centers, is a clear political liability this campaign cycle. That’s why Barack Obama wants Democrats to emphasize AI regulation on the campaign trail. Data centers could cost Republican John Husted his reelection to the Senate in Ohio. And they could harm Democrat Cait Conley in her run against Mike Lawler in New York’s swingy 17th congressional district.

        But here’s the thing: Many moral panics aren’t based in reality. The Salem witch trials weren’t based in sound reason. Nor, in more recent memory, were the lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates of COVID-19.

        For that matter, what is the current AI doomsaying if not a form of digital COVID?

        The way out of a baseless moral panic is not to pander to the mob. It is to demonstrate leadership.

        That’s why we remember Abraham Lincoln and his appeals to natural right — and not Stephen Douglas, who pleaded for might-makes-right “popular sovereignty.”

        Trump is making a similar case today. Earlier this week, he dismissed the AI moral panic as a “hoax.”

        That’s leadership. As the 18th-century conservative British statesman Edmund Burke once said: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

        Majority sentiment certainly matters. A dose of populism is not just healthy — it’s vital. A society where the elites are wildly out of touch with the commoners is not a society built to last.

        But sometimes majority sentiment is wrong. After all, eugenics, forced sterilizations and anti-miscegenation laws were all once broadly popular.

        None of this is to say there aren’t valid concerns with AI. There are pressing ethical concerns. AI models should not tell a troubled teenage girl how to harm herself. The algorithms must not help a man rob the local bank.

        But the data center backlash is silly and misplaced. Taken to its logical conclusion, shutting down all data centers would end the internet itself.

        Would that really be a step forward for humanity?

        Prudence is a long-forgotten word in the Western political lexicon. Aristotle referred to it as the queen of the virtues and the essence of statesmanship. Lincoln exhibited it in spades.

        It’s what we desperately need, amidst our crippling AI civil war. Some specific regulations are desirable, even necessary. But many are not. And a full, industry-wide innovation shutdown would be nothing short of suicidal.

        In the short term, the AI doomsayers are likely to prevail. Trump’s robustly pro-AI stance won’t help Republicans this November.

        But history books aren’t written on the outcome of a single election. We forget that at our own peril.

        To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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