A growing divide is opening on the American left over whether to take tech companies seriously when they claim artificial intelligence could end humanity, according to a new report from WIRED. The ideological fracture surfaced publicly in September when the New York City Democratic Socialists of America posted that "AI alarmism and AI hype are the same story," drawing more than 25,000 likes but also sharp criticism from those who believe the warnings are legitimate. The split centers on whether the left should prioritize regulating AI's current documented harms or also address theoretical future dangers that frontier labs say their products pose.
One camp questions whether elevating speculative concerns about AI empowers the very companies being regulated. "AI has become the latest tool of capitalist exploitation," Alan Dang, a member of the NYC DSA's Tech Action Working Group, told WIRED, adding that "as socialists, we don't trust these corporations to craft their own regulations." Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders has enthusiastically embraced the AI safety cause, asserting that the technology has potential to eliminate humanity and releasing a data center moratorium bill in March that explicitly connected pausing construction with protecting "the future of humanity." His positioning has inspired messaging from left-wing candidates nationwide, with six Working Families Party candidates releasing statements in September on the need to regulate AI against existential threats. AI researcher Timnit Gebru has accused Sanders and others of "taking their cues from literal doomsday eugenicist cults," while one NYC DSA member with a tech background said privately that some are asking, "what happened?" to Sanders.
The report finds that critics of the extinction-focused approach believe frontier labs benefit from the attention their doomsday scenarios generate. Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of nonprofit Humane Intelligence and former leader of Twitter's machine learning ethics team, explained that companies "grab all the attention, time, energy, and money by spouting really extreme perspectives," then backtrack while discounting outside expertise. For AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic aiming to go public soon, the scrutiny could prove advantageous: "This way, they can say, there is a full regulatory regime that they are part of establishing in this industry to guard against the worst risks," Chowdhury noted. Defenders of addressing existential risk argue there's no real conflict. "The same people concerned about frontier governance and the development of superintelligence are also addressing those current harms," Democratic strategist Alexander McCoy said, asserting that critics represent "marginal, unrepresentative" voices picking "an unnecessary distinction."
The debate carries practical stakes as regulations take shape across statehouses and Washington. Phil Aroneanu, executive director of left-leaning pro-AI-safety group Irreplaceable, compared the situation to climate activism's balance between immediate extraction impacts and long-term emissions risks, saying both AI's present and future threats warrant attention. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to be threading a middle path, cosponsoring Sanders' moratorium bill but focusing her own language more on data centers and job harms, telling a reporter last week that "two things can be true at once" and AI "can be very dangerous when pursued without any guardrails." A convention resolution now before the DSA proposes supporting Sanders and Representative Greg Casar's bill to ban superintelligence entirely—something frontier labs would oppose. According to the report, a Politico poll released in September showed two in three Americans believe there's at least some risk AI could "destroy humanity," suggesting the debate may ultimately be settled by public opinion rather than internal left-wing disagreement. The friction reflects a tactical question facing progressive organizers everywhere: whether amplifying corporate claims about world-ending technology undermines or strengthens the case for reining in an industry already causing measurable damage today.