Dan Osborn was finishing up his fourth town hall last Sunday, he says, when a “hardcore MAGA” guy approached him. Osborn, who is running for the US Senate in Nebraska as an independent against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, said that he and the man didn’t have much common ground—at first.
“Then I said, ‘Hey, what’s your take on AI and data centers?’” Osborn says. “Boy, right away, we were in lockstep, 100 percent agreement.”
Osborn is one of more than 15 politicians running for office in states across the country who have signed on to the AI Pact, a set of five promises around regulating both data centers and AI itself. As concerns about data centers have exploded in the midterm cycle, politicians are scrambling to respond to voters’ worries about their environmental impacts, the secrecy surrounding their construction, and the corporate power behind them. The new pledge is intended, according to its website, to provide “a needed baseline to ensure a humanity-first future.”
The pact is an offshoot of the Political Integrity Project, an anti-money-in-politics group that has a similar pledge for candidates. Daniel Lobo-Lewis, one of the founders, says that he and his cofounders came up with the five promises in the AI Pact—which include advocating for mandatory safety reviews for AI models, supporting policies that would create an AI dividend for workers, and ensuring that consumers and companies can sue over harms caused by models—by networking with AI safety groups and other political organizations working on AI legislation. (Funding for the AI Pact is provided by a progressive political action committee, and no AI safety groups or tech companies are directly funding the initiative, Lobo-Lewis says.)
All of the pledge’s current signers, save for Osborn, are Democrats, although Lobo-Lewis emphasizes that it would welcome Republican signers. Some of the signers have built their campaigns around opposition to data centers and Big Tech, like Representative Justin Pearson, a Tennessee Democrat who rose to national prominence pushing back against pollution from SpaceX’s data centers, and Will Lawrence, a left candidate who won a competitive primary in Michigan in a district rife with data center opposition.
The pledge does not call for an explicit moratorium on data centers but rather to “support policies that would ban tax breaks, backroom deals, and excessive energy usage for data centers.” This kind of measured language is intentional, Lobo-Lewis says, and is meant to be a “floor” for candidates to sign on to—especially those with strong ties to labor. (Several labor unions have recently reaffirmed their support for data center construction.)
“Candidates in swing seats are laser-focused on affordability, creating jobs, and lowering costs,” says Alexander McCoy, a progressive strategist working on AI issues. “Some of them don’t necessarily want to say no to the possibility that a data center project can help with those things. At the same time, AI is expected to be incredibly disruptive unless guardrails are put in place. So is it worth it to create some construction jobs now, at the cost of destroying the opportunities available to other workers in your district?”
When I asked Osborn, a Navy veteran and labor leader, about where he falls on calling for a moratorium, he told me that data centers can provide “a lot of infrastructure and a lot of jobs.” But Osborn, who’s campaigning in rural areas where worried farmers are concerned about losing their land to development, also says that Congress needs to step in to regulate data centers.
“We’ve got to get this right,” he says. “Calling a time-out right now doesn’t seem like a horrible thing.”
Osborn’s position is increasingly common across the political spectrum. In recent weeks, governors who have previously been all in on data center development, like Pennsylvania Democrat Josh Shapiro and Texas Republican Greg Abbott, have taken major steps to assure voters that they are regulating data center development. (Abbott, who said last weekend that data centers have “dug their own grave” in his state, initiated a temporary moratorium on their construction this month.)
Some of the other promises listed in the AI Pact are, similarly, political positions that leaders of both parties have recently entertained. As WIRED has reported, the White House is currently developing a voluntary safety review for AI models, while Trump has met with AI executives on the idea of developing a worker dividend for AI profits—an idea pitched to him, reportedly, by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The Trump administration has also encouraged AI companies, governors, and utilities to sign on to a voluntary pledge to protect ratepayers from electricity increases due to data centers.
Lobo-Lewis says that the pact provides assurances for much stronger protections, and he dismisses the White House’s actions on AI as just lip service. “I can’t imagine [the Trump administration] would actually want to do mandatory safety reviews for models, or nationwide tax breaks for data center construction,” he says. Abbott’s opponent in the Texas gubernatorial race, state representative Gina Hinojosa, is a signer of the pact; she has gone on the offensive against Abbott’s moratorium, claiming that he is not doing enough to ensure “that the people will be protected.”
“These data centers are supporting an AI industry that has no rules. It threatens our jobs, livelihood, health, safety, and well-being. As AI develops this fast, we need basic ground rules—we need laws to protect Texans. We should not be replacing teachers with AI. We should not be replacing nurses with AI,” Hinojosa tells WIRED. “AI can be a useful tool, but it has to be used responsibly, and right now we don't have the guardrails to make sure it is.”
The pledge comes as the political class debates whether voters’ worries about data centers are related to their concerns about AI—and indeed whether they should be worried at all. (Trump, for one, has repeatedly and vigorously expressed his support for data center construction, saying recently, “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it.”)
In March, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, became one of the first politicians to link AI safety measures to data centers when he proposed a national moratorium on their construction until Congress passes legislation “that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” A small but growing number of politicians have since followed suit, increasingly tying data center development to larger concerns about AI. Earlier this week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, running as a Republican for Senate, released a data center plan that included making data centers legally liable for chatbots that “undermine children’s safety.” Still, some polling suggests that environmental worries about data centers still far outrank AI concerns among the public, raising questions from some pundits about how closely data center opposition is connected to worries about AI.
For Osborn, the idea that voters are not connecting the dots between data centers and the negatives of Big Tech—especially the violation of privacy rights and the proliferation of Flock cameras—is something that’s being solely incubated in Washington, DC.
“They like to pretend that we're all stupid,” he says, with a sly laugh.
