Candidates Are Signing a Pact Promising Action on Data Centers and AI Safety
More than 15 politicians from across the country have signed on to the AI Pact, vowing to regulate data centers and AI. “We’ve got to get this right,” says Senate candidate Dan Osborn of Nebraska.
Dan Osborn was finishing up his fourth town hall last Sunday, he says, when a “hardcore MAGA” guy approached him. Osborn, who is running for the US Senate in Nebraska as an independent against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, said that he and the man didn’t have much common ground—at first.
“Then I said, ‘Hey, what’s your take on AI and data centers?’” Osborn says. “Boy, right away, we were in lockstep, 100 percent agreement.”
The pact is an offshoot of the Political Integrity Project, an anti-money-in-politics group that has a similar pledge for candidates. Daniel Lobo-Lewis, one of the founders, says that he and his cofounders came up with the five promises in the AI Pact—which include advocating for mandatory safety reviews for AI models, supporting policies that would create an AI dividend for workers, and ensuring that consumers and companies can sue over harms caused by models—by networking with AI safety groups and other political organizations working on AI legislation. (Funding for the AI Pact is provided by a progressive political action committee, and no AI safety groups or tech companies are directly funding the initiative, Lobo-Lewis says.)
All of the pledge’s current signers, save for Osborn, are Democrats, although Lobo-Lewis emphasizes that it would welcome Republican signers. Some of the signers have built their campaigns around opposition to data centers and Big Tech, like Representative Justin Pearson, a Tennessee Democrat who rose to national prominence pushing back against pollution from SpaceX’s data centers , and Will Lawrence, a left candidate who won a competitive primary in Michigan in a district rife with data center opposition .
The pledge does not call for an explicit moratorium on data centers but rather to “support policies that would ban tax breaks, backroom deals, and excessive energy usage for data centers.” This kind of measured language is intentional, Lobo-Lewis says, and is meant to be a “floor” for candidates to sign on to—especially those with strong ties to labor. (Several labor unions have recently reaffirmed their support for data center construction.)
