Senator Bernie Sanders took to the Wall Street Journal last week with a warning that should rattle anyone paying attention. Artificial intelligence, as it's currently developing, threatens the foundations of American life. And he's got the receipts. Quinnipiac polling shows 55% of Americans believe AI will do more harm than good, 70% fear it will eliminate jobs, and 74% think the government has failed to regulate the technology. Sanders frames the problem as one of concentrated power. AI development is dominated by a handful of billionaires including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison.
The economic concerns aren't abstract. Sanders quotes Musk's prediction that "AI and robots will replace all jobs" and Gates's statement that humans won't be needed "for most things." If machines do the work, how do people earn a living? Sanders also points to social risks. Common Sense Media reports that 72% of U.S. teenagers have used AI companions, and Sanders worries about what happens to human relationships when people form bonds with software. Then there's privacy. Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman, has publicly described a future of AI-powered surveillance. Sanders finds this alarming.
That surveillance future is already being built. Oracle is constructing the infrastructure right now. The company won the CIA's Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract in 2024, giving it authority over top-secret cloud workloads for intelligence agencies. Oracle also provides computing power for the Pentagon's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, supporting military AI applications including real-time surveillance. At Oracle CloudWorld in 2024, Ellison described AI systems that would monitor police body cameras and autonomous drones to report crimes instantly. The technology Sanders warns about is being built right now, with government contracts footing the bill.
The debate around Sanders' piece quickly turned to a familiar tension. Some readers argued that heavy U.S. regulation would simply allow less constrained nations like China to dominate AI development. Sanders doesn't address this directly in the OpEd, but his framing makes clear who he thinks benefits from the status quo: a small group of already-wealthy tech executives. The American public, by contrast, is deeply skeptical about where this is heading. They should be.