Even before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint in the White House, he was promising to unleash “AI innovation” on an unprecedented scale.
Despite grumblings from the populist Republican sect, the billionaire-in-chief soon made good on those promises, cozying up to AI moguls like Sam Altman and promising to flip the US power grid on its head in order to feed the growing demand for AI data centers.
Now a year and a half into his second term, a growing number of Americans are clearly fed up with the president’s pandering to the tech industry. A new poll conducted by Upswing Research and Strategy in cooperation with the AI accountability group Guardrails Action surveyed Americans in New York’s 12th congressional district, a diverse tract encompassing parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Respondents, broadly, are very skeptical of Trump’s AI regime, with an enormous 79 percent saying their “top concern” with AI is that tech companies are “too close to Trump and helping him erode democracy.”
A further 81 percent flagged AI companies stealing data and private information as either their “top concern” or a “major concern,” while 71 percent said AI-integrated surveillance of Americans is a top or major concern.
While New York’s 12th district is one of the bluest voting blocks in the United States, Trump’s AI strategy wasn’t the only thing catching flack. Nearly half of all respondents also dogged Democrats, saying party leadership sold out to big corporations and special interests to fund their campaigns. Sure enough, Democratic party leadership has accepted millions of dollars from AI super PACs in 2026. The tech industry spigot is evidently so lucrative that incumbent Democratic candidates have been warned by party strategists not to antagonize the tech industry, though an adversarial stance would clearly be massively popular with a huge swath of voters.
“With their absurd lobbying spending, PR budgets, and corporate super PACs, these Big AI goliaths think they can buy off our government, our elections, our leaders, and our future and nobody will notice,” Guardrails Action executive director Shaunna Thomas said in a statement.
Continuing, Thomas argued that voters “want leaders that won’t sell out to Big AI, corporate donors, or Trump’s fascist agenda. MAGA mega donors and corporate super PACs should not be getting special treatment in closed door meetings on the Hill and in the White House; and they should have no place in Democratic primaries.”
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