MAGA is divided over the promise and perils of AI

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In the world according to the “War Room", a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist, woke liberals and shadowy globalists are out to get America. But in recent months the show has drawn a new battle line.

Artificial intelligence (AI), Mr Bannon warned in a recent episode, would soon engender “the most fundamental, radical transformation" in human history. “It must be stopped, slowed down and put in the control of humans and not the four horsemen of the apocalypse." Those horsemen, Mr Bannon says, are the chief executives of America’s leading AI firms. This is the most visible split between two irreconcilable factions within MAGA: secular techno-libertarians and religious paleo-conservatives.

And, given the valuations of the AI economy, its promises and pitfalls, it may be the most consequential one. Some of Silicon Valley’s AI elite has indeed cosied-up to the president. For his part, Donald Trump appears taken by the technology.

(“We should change the name…it’s not artificial, it’s pure genius.") His AI Action Plan, issued in the summer, called for deregulation to unleash “global AI dominance," delighting MAGA accelerationists. The MAGA decelerationist wing has two kinds of objection. The first is practical.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia and, until recently, a staunch Trump loyalist, warns that AI will lead to mass unemployment among working-class Americans. Others fret about children and teens being caught in manipulative, sometimes even erotic, relationships with large language models. Angela Paxton, a Trumpy Republican state senator from Texas who helped pass a state ban on using AI to create sexually explicit content that features