The Political Skirmish Over Trump’s AI Order Is Just the Beginning

The White House drama has given new signals of populist opposition to technology that holds the promise of eliminating lots of jobs

WASHINGTON—In one of the first big political tests of AI, Big Tech won. But the fight has given new signals of populist opposition to technology that holds the promise of eliminating lots of jobs.

President Trump signing an executive order on artificial intelligence.

The weekslong maneuvering ended in the Oval Office this past week, with President Trump signing an executive order aimed at limiting states from implementing laws that tech companies worry will slow development of artificial intelligence.

The measure had drawn unusually vocal opposition from Republicans such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Steve Bannon, who holds great sway among the MAGA part of the Republican Party. And it isn’t just conservative populists raising concerns about tech titans winning a much-wanted policy fight. At the other extreme, liberals, too, are increasingly asking pointed questions about what the technology might mean.

“Is the goal of the AI revolution simply to make the very, very richest people on earth even richer and even more powerful?” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said in a lengthy video message released recently.

Sanders has been raising a long list of worries—such as what happens if millions of jobs are eliminated—that a few years ago would have sounded far-fetched, if not for the fact that he was quoting public predictions being made by the likes of Elon Musk and other tech bros who have said workers will be replaced by AI and robots.

To illustrate how quickly things are moving: The architect of Trump’s AI order was the tech investor David Sacks, who had originally tried to get DeSantis elected president.

Now, Sacks—as Trump’s AI czar—is very much on the other side of the AI debate from DeSantis, who joined others in advocating for states to be able to implement their own guardrails to protect against AI.

Instead, Sacks has said such moves would hinder the U.S.’s ability to compete with China. In an apparent compromise, he said the administration would target the “most onerous examples of state regulation,” adding that it wouldn’t push back on efforts such as child safety.

In some ways, the past few weeks have been a policy disagreement as old as the Founding Fathers, pitting federal power versus states’ rights.

In other ways, though, it was just the first in what will likely be many thorny questions around technology that not everyone fully understands. AI arrives in Washington after lawmakers have struggled to get their collective arms around previous tech waves—social media and cryptocurrency.

The stakes regarding AI, however, feel even greater, especially as the build-out of AI data centers has helped fuel an otherwise uncertain economy.

“This is the single most important economic question in the country and in the world—who wins the race for AI,” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, told reporters Thursday at the White House ahead of Trump’s signing the order.

Efforts to push similar measures through Congress had failed.

For weeks, Bannon has fanned the MAGA flames regarding the idea of a moratorium being placed on state AI laws. And DeSantis has critically poked at tech’s conventional wisdom around AI—from the suggestions that some companies were becoming too big to fail (and might need government help) to the role AI might play in society.

When Musk, for example, told Tesla shareholders last month that AI was going to be in charge in the long run, DeSantis asked why would we want such a future.

“As a creation of man, AI will not be divorced from the flaws of human nature; indeed, it is more likely to magnify those flaws,” DeSantis posted on X. “This is not safe; it is dangerous.”

AI is one of the rare areas that you see Republicans disagree publicly with the president. And it’s probably because AI hasn’t yet divided neatly between the parties. There are supporters and critics on both sides.

Concerns about AI haven’t yet risen to any level of significance in polling of voters, even as companies are collectively committing trillions of dollars toward the technology, pollsters tell me.

“I’ve never seen a topic…where you have a bigger focus economically and…a smaller focus politically,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “Normally the two go hand in hand.”

There have been more immediate concerns, from worries about inflation to immigration. And we don’t yet know what to think about AI.

The Trump administration has been stressing the economic benefits to the nation. This past week, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told an audience at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit in Washington that he didn’t anticipate massive job losses because of AI while also acknowledging that technological change can be unsettling.

“The history of it is that electricity turned out to be a good thing, the internal combustion engine turned out to be a good thing, the computer turned out to be a good thing and I think AI will as well,” said Hassett, who is in the running to become Federal Reserve chair.

Also at the Journal event, Mark Penn, chief executive of Stagwell, a global marketing network, released results of a survey of CEOs that found that almost 70% of respondents said they expected AI would weaken the U.S. job market, even as they were largely optimistic that the technology would strengthen the economy.

That seeming disconnect could underscore the painful transition ahead.

At a different event in Washington, Sanders recently pressed Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the godfathers of AI, on what AI could mean for employment. The senator noted that he often hears, as do I, that many supporters think that while AI will displace some jobs, it will also create new ones—a pattern seen throughout history. “Is this different from other types of technological revolutions?” he asked.

“Yes, this is very different,” Hinton replied, “because the people who lose their jobs won’t have other jobs to go to if AI gets as smart as people, or smarter. Any job they might do can be done by AI.”

Hinton added that tech leaders haven’t seemed to absorb that if workers don’t get paid, there won’t be people to buy their products. “They haven’t really thought through the massive social disruption we’ll get if we get very high unemployment,” he said.

Some have. And privately, some CEOs this past week told me they are worried about the political upheaval that seems inevitable with massive job losses.If the 2024 political cycle centered on worries about illegal immigration, it’s easy to imagine the 2028 election could very well be about a new kind of “other” taking U.S. jobs: AI.

Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com