- Bernie Sanders warns that AI could destroy humans or, worse, the planet
- This moratorium would prevent future construction or expansion of data centers.
- Most tech leaders have warned of job losses or other impacts.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) (D-NY) have shared details of the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act (2026), which maintains that data center construction across the country should be suspended for both new sites and upgrades.
The goal of the bill is to allow the US government’s oversight of AI to catch up by slowing development, preventing big tech from influencing society, the economy or democracy.
Sanders and AOC worry that massive AI deployments have already led to job losses, citing many other concerns, so the pause on data centers would allow the United States to regulate the technology more carefully before it gets out of control.
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Bernie Sanders wants to slow down data centers to protect American citizens
AI has already been linked to layoffs, and the two warn of mass unemployment, but also cite concerns about mass surveillance and monitoring, deepfakes, misinformation, and environmental impacts associated with high water and electricity use.
A summary notice details how many of the world’s richest and/or most influential people have already acknowledged some of the above concerns, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman, Ford’s Jim Farley, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and more.
The moratorium would prohibit both the construction of new AI data centers and upgrades to existing facilities, until certain conditions are met that would lift the ban. Those conditions focus on privacy, civil rights, the economy, the environment and communities.
“This bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet,” the two summarize.
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