WASHINGTON-Steve Bannon has made a career out of clashing with far-left politicians. But these days, President Trump's former chief strategist has found a common cause with them: opposition to the AI boom.
The far-right podcast host has joined Democrats in warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the need to fight data centers that power AI deployment.
Bannon backs a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), who are aligned with the insurgent Democratic socialists, to ban the construction of new data centers. He has rallied grassroots support to fight the Trump administration's efforts to deploy an industry-friendly AI strategy that bans states from passing their own regulations, and he backs Sanders's recent call for AI companies to pause development. The positions put him squarely at odds with his former boss.
"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor," Trump said on social media Monday.
Bannon said he was looking past his disagreements with progressives on issues such as immigration because AI will be the defining issue of the future.
"If we don't get this right, none of that other stuff is going to matter," Bannon, who previously received a pardon from Trump, said in an interview. "I have not seen any issue in modern American life at the populist level that unites disparate elements of our country more than this."
Bannon's experience shows how AI is the latest "horseshoe issue" that unites the left and right populist flanks of each party. The bipartisan opposition to the data centers, which is growing even as little has been done to address the issue in Washington, is driven by concerns about the centers' power and water consumption, potential AI-caused job losses and broad distrust of Big Tech.
"Politics is always a situation where you make strange coalitions and different coalitions every day," Sanders said in an interview. "But on this issue, I think many of the right-wing people have the same concerns that I have."
In seeking Republicans' support, Sanders said he had pitched the AI backlash as a religious issue because the technology advances highlight deeper questions about what it is like to be human. Bannon has taken a similar approach, hiring a transhumanism editor years ago who comments about AI risks on Bannon's "War Room" podcast. Sanders said he hadn't spoken about AI with Bannon or Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who recently debated television personality Kevin O'Leary about O'Leary's plans for a data center in Utah.
Bannon said he now spends 75% of his time fighting AI's expansion-when he isn't working on his podcast-and can't tell whether data-center foes who attend town-hall events he watches are Trump supporters or Sanders fans. Bannon said he talks to several progressives about AI and has criticized his former boss for having close ties to tech executives.
"Just so you know we're not friends, you can't sit with us, but we can agree on this one," Megan Romer, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, said about being on the same side of an issue as Bannon.
The AI backlash is fueling a wave of campaign ads in races across the country along with legislative proposals. The resistance is forcing congressional candidates and governors such as Republican Greg Abbott of Texas and Democrat Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania-who both praised data centers last year-to backpedal and pause or restrict development. Abbott is one of the country's longest-serving Republican governors, and Shapiro is a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.
Ads that cast data centers or AI in a negative light have been run by candidates or outside groups in more than 70 U.S. House, Senate and gubernatorial races since 2025, according to a Wall Street Journal review of transcripts collected by AdImpact.
The messaging goes beyond federal contests. Ads with anti-AI content, or that promise action around halting or mitigating the impacts of data centers, have run in at least 50 state legislative races and further down the ballot, including an Arizona mayoral contest and a county-commissioner primary in Colorado. In some races, including the contest to replace Republican Ron DeSantis as Florida governor, both leading candidates have targeted some aspects of data centers in advertisements.
"I'm not sure if there's a more bipartisan issue today than the backlash against unregulated AI data centers," said Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council in the Clinton and Obama administrations and advised the Biden White House.
He recently advised on a bill sponsored by progressive Rep. Greg Casar (D., Texas) that would create a new tax on AI companies. Sperling said he thought the economic fears were helping to make AI a mainstream, "apple pie" kitchen-table topic.
The issue has touched license-plate reader Flock Safety, whose AI-enabled cameras used to deter and solve crimes have fed fears across the U.S. about surveillance. Progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and conservatives such as DeSantis and Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) are among those calling for increased oversight of the company, and the volume of ads focused on the issue has surged.
While the backlash is fervent on the ground, Washington remains stuck. Sanders's legislation to institute a federal moratorium on data-center construction has no Senate co-sponsors. While Ocasio-Cortez, the bill's sponsor in the House, has 14 co-sponsors, all of them are Democrats. The same is true for Casar's tax proposal.
Bills sponsored by Democrats and Republicans such as measures addressing the power consumption of data centers, chatbot usage and chip-export restrictions have made some progress in Congress but haven't become law and plenty of opposition remains from allies of Trump and the tech industry.
"First they killed our timber mills, then our mines, then our factories-now data centers. Every good-paying, middle-class employment powerhouse has been systematically murdered by globalist and communist lobbying in America," Montana Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy said recently on X.
Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist and co-founder of data-mining firm Palantir who donated to Trump, recently said that the administration and tech industry needed to stand up to "crazy populists." He labeled them the "BBC": Bernie, Bannon and the Chinese Communist Party.
"All those people want to ban data centers and they want America to lose," Lonsdale, who backs an industry super PAC, said on Fox Business. "We have to make sure the BBC radicals lose."
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