Former President Barack Obama has added his voice to a growing chorus of Democratic leaders calling for tighter limits on artificial intelligence, a notable shift for a party that spent the past decade championing the technology’s economic and strategic upside.
In a statement posted to X on Monday night, Obama wrote that AI is “moving at lightning speed – and even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with.” He argued that Washington needs to act. “We need government – and specifically our leaders in Washington – to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread,” he said.
Obama went further, saying the decision to slow development should not be left to the tech industry itself. “Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box. But we can collectively determine how it’s developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us,” he wrote, adding that any “potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now.”
The tone marks a departure from his administration’s approach in 2016, when the White House’s Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy report leaned heavily on optimism. “Advances in AI technology hold incredible potential to help the United States stay on the cutting edge of innovation,” that report said, adding that AI had “opened up new markets and new opportunities for progress in critical areas such as health, education, energy, economic inclusion, social welfare, and the environment” and “should be welcomed for its potential economic benefits.”
A Party-Wide Shift
Obama isn’t alone. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who as recently as January 2025 declared that “it is imperative that the United States remain the global leader on AI” while the Biden administration pushed to speed up data-center buildout, has since reversed course. Harris has called the pace of frontier AI development “alarming” and urged Congress to set firmer oversight and safety standards.
“The frontier of artificial intelligence is advancing at an alarming speed. Over the weekend, industry leaders voiced support for an idea that the American people and many AI researchers in their own labs have been calling for: We must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development,” Harris wrote.
The Biden administration’s own record reflects the earlier posture: on Jan. 14, it issued an executive order intended to accelerate AI infrastructure — including large data centers and clean-energy projects — to keep the U.S. ahead of global rivals.
Republicans Cry Politics
Attorney General Todd Blanche dismissed the Democrats’ newfound urgency as election-year maneuvering rather than a genuine policy awakening. “Every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months, a month. So to talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud, of course, that what it is what it is,” Blanche said Tuesday.
President Donald Trump, who has made rapid AI development and the data centers that power it a centerpiece of his agenda, has called Democrats’ warnings a “hoax.” His administration continues to promote the economic benefits of the technology even as it faces mounting political scrutiny over the cost and footprint of data-center expansion nationwide.
AI and data centers have emerged as a live issue heading into the midterms, with concerns over electricity costs, job displacement and the speed of the buildout drawing attention from candidates in both parties. Fox News Digital reached out to Obama, Harris and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s teams for comment.
