We’re now flooded with articles about the threat of AI. Here’s another one from the Times op-ed page by a tech journalist, Stephen Witt, who’s written a history of Nvidia, the chip maker powering a lot of the AI boom. Witt describes a few possible approaches to legal intervention. Interestingly, he points to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) as two legislators pitching new laws to get in control of the situation. Casar has a quote that captures it all and illustrates how absent “externalities” are to anything about how we regulate tech: “If the A.I. companies understood that their products have to be safe before they can advance, then they will make the kinds of investments that we need.” Of course, having two left-wing legislators from the party which isn’t even in power as the two guys on the case doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that anything is going to happen any time soon.

You’ve probably seen these reports of an employee of the AI company Anthropic who quit his job and issued a warning on X that suggested AI could, in next few years, escape control and lead to the extinction of humanity. These sound like not just wild but science fiction-type claims. And they’ve lurked around frontier AI labs for years. It’s one of the many weirdnesses of the AI world and those who lead it. The basic pitch: AI is awesome. We need to built it as quickly as possible. Also it might lead to human extinction. Quite an attractive offer! There’s always been a strong sense among many observers that these claims or suggestions or warnings are part of the AI hype machine itself, albeit of a kind of contradictory or paradoxical variety.

But this warning by the ex-Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, seems different and is unquestionably being reacted to very differently. That’s the one part of this that is new and real – the reaction to this warning/comment etc is much bigger and operating in the tech, financial and general media. Wired has a good interview with him here. (I think you can read it as a free article if you haven’t read other Wired articles this month.) The gist is that Coxon says it’s imperative to create a regulatory structure, or at least an ad-hoc agreement that can slow the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most advanced AI engines and research entities. (The inflection point people are focusing on is something called “recursive self-improvement,” which is when this generation of AI model builds the next one.) The problem is that you really need an agreement that brings China into some common framework too. Because they’re in this same hunt, running these same risks, even though I think the common consensus is that Chinese companies are running at least somewhat behind the most advanced U.S. companies. China’s strength has been building models which are only a bit behind the U.S. models but at dramatically lowest costs.

In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.

The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.

As you can see in my most recent post, yesterday evening TPM Reader BC flagged this news out of Independence, Missouri, best known as the hometown of Harry Truman. A city councilman, John Perkins, got canned in a recall election over a data center and by a massive margin: 68% of the town’s residents voted to end Perkin’s term immediately. It’s all backlash from the town’s approval of a major hyperscale AI data center on which construction is now already well underway.

While this is just one city council race, the broader metastory and this particular development sounds like one of the ur-stories of the 2026 midterm cycle. It coincides with and is related to the backlash against Donald Trump and all his corruption and wrongdoing over the last 18 months. But it’s only in the last three or four months that the AI data center story has fully broken into the national headlines. For all these reasons, I wanted to dig in and find out a bit more of the details. It’s really quite storybook in a kind of made-for-TV-movie dystopian kind of way.

Here’s the story as I understand it.

We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.

It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.