AI Factions: A Political Field Guide

A mapping of six of the major factions shaping AI politics: beliefs, money, policy positions, schisms, and alignments.

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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The Six AI Factions

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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New Arrival: AI Populists

The Sixth Faction: AI Populists

Every other faction is defined by its answer to "what is AI?" This one is defined by "who has power?" Its analysis: most people are open to AI as technology — but not to the tech oligarchy, corruption, autocracy, and climate cost that come with its current trajectory. That makes it a political-economy faction, not an AI-prediction faction.

  • Theory of change: near-term harms (surveillance, deepfakes, job loss) are legitimate concerns AND organizing gateways to structural demands about power and wealth concentration.
  • The data center moratorium movement is its main people-power lever: slowing the buildout opens the Overton window for a real policy framework. (Not universally embraced — some in the camp think it is the wrong fight to attach to AI regulation.)
  • A "token tax" is the emerging insider version of the same strategy: policy pressure to bring labs to the negotiating table.
  • Expect many more groups to land here: this is the accountability wing of the progressive movement arriving in AI politics.

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Terminology Decoder

Language as a tell for different factions (a sampling- many more shibboliths exist)

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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The Political Overlay: Money, Coalitions and Flashpoints

The Money (2026 cycle)

Crypto and AI super PACs have amassed a record total this cycle (see figures below). Transformer AI in Politics Tracker

  • Pro-guardrails: Public First Action (Anthropic-linked) and Guardrails Alliance (~$5M, union and tech-worker funded).
  • First stress test, NY-12 Democratic primary: roughly $29M flowed around RAISE Act author Alex Bores in an eight-candidate field that also included Jack Schlossberg and George Conway. Leading the Future spent ~$8M against Bores; Public First Action spent ~$11M for him; Guardrails Alliance added $250K. $10m from Bloomberg likely also against RAISE, but not explicitly through an AI PAC. Micah Lasher won. Name recognition and affordability dominated voter concerns, the attacks against Bores raised his/the race's national profile. NY-12 is a first test of AI money's reach, but not definitive of its impact.

Flashpoint 1: Federal Preemption of State AI Laws

The Tech Right wants one national framework and tried a state-law moratorium and NDAA preemption. A horseshoe coalition beat it: Warren and Sanders alongside Bannon, Greene, Hawley, and Paul. The July 2025 amendment stripping the moratorium from the reconciliation bill passed 99-1 [VERIFY: name the amendment sponsors]; 290+ state lawmakers had already opposed preemption. Note: a separate NDAA preemption attempt followed; these are distinct fights. A December 2025 executive order then created an AI Litigation Task Force to sue states anyway.

Flashpoint 2: Data Centers and Electricity Prices

Bipartisan backlash has made data centers a kitchen-table issue: three-quarters of Democrats and nearly two-thirds of Republicans oppose a nearby facility, and utility bills are now a core affordability concern. Dozens of projects have stalled or been blocked (see figures below).

Bottom line: safety, ethics, and AI populist camps hold no power in this White House; the Tech Right has money and access but keeps colliding with a populist-progressive horseshoe over state preemption, data centers, and now surveillance.

$54.9m

AI super PAC total this cycle - all sides [Transformer]

99–1

Senate vote against state preemption moratorium

61%

Voters oppose a nearby data center [Blue Rose June 2025]

~$130B

Data center projects stalled in Q1 2026

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Schisms and Surprising Overlaps

Internal Fights Worth Knowing

Within AI Safety

Yudkowsky/MIRI purists ('shut it all down') vs. Coefficient Giving/Anthropic . Anthropic is the flashpoint: hypocrite to some, best hope to others.

Within the Right

Tech Right vs. MAGA base is open war over preemption and now surveillance. The Tech Right's own voters are turning against data centers and rate hikes.

Within the Left

Ethics camp and safety camp compete for regulatory oxygen; the TESCREAL fight leaves open wounds. The AI Populists' data-center moratorium strategy is not universally embraced even inside the camp.

Within Labor

Building trades want data center construction jobs and resist moratorium framing. AFT and AAUP are funding the Guardrails Alliance. SAG-AFTRA and WGA are fighting a separate consent-and-compensation war over training data. AFL-CIO has not unified these blocs into a single AI position.

Within the Child Safety Coalition

Agreement on need for accountability; disagreement on remedies. Fairplay, Encode, and Design It For Us want duty-of-care and age-assurance mandates. EFF, CDT, and Fight for the Future call that an ID checkpoint on the internet and oppose KOSA and STOP CSAM outright. CDT co-signed an anti-age-verification letter with Americans for Prosperity.

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Scrambler 1: Data Centers

Data centers are where the factions break formation: the build coalition includes the safety camp's flagship company, and the opposition spans Food and Water Watch to MAGA.

🏗️ Team Build

Tech Right / White House — The AI Action Plan's core pillar is "Build American AI Infrastructure": faster permitting, looser environmental review.

"Technology is going to happen. Trying to stop it is like ordering the tides to stop." — David Sacks, White House AI czar

Frontier labs, including the "safety" one — OpenAI wants 250 GW of capacity by 2033, "a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week." Anthropic committed $50B to US data centers, asking "do we have what it takes to build AI in America?" (though it pledged to shoulder ratepayer price hikes itself).

🛑 Team Stop

Ethics and enviro left — 500+ groups from 47 states demand a congressional moratorium.

"Wherever these hyperscale data centers are built, electricity rates skyrocket for families and small businesses, water stability is threatened, and communities are turned upside down." — Emily Wurth, Food and Water Watch

AI Populists — the moratorium is strategy, not just defense: slowing the buildout is the one people-power lever that opens space for a real regulatory framework.

"Data centers increase residential energy bills by upwards of 250% and many communities are left in the dark on these projects from the start." — Meghan Pazik, Public Citizen

MAGA populists — blasting their own administration:

"How dare the peasants complain about data centers stealing their water and driving the cost of electricity!!" — Marjorie Taylor Greene, mocking reported FBI monitoring of data center protesters

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Scrambler 2: Open Source AI

"Open weights" is not open source: you can download the model but not the training data or code. Critics call the gap "open washing." Each faction means something different by "open."

Open as Weapon

Tech Right: a16z leads with "Asserting American Leadership in Open Source AI"; it is in Trump's AI Action Plan. The pitch: open models let little tech compete and beat China. The tell: "open source" here mostly means deregulation.

Open as Threat

AI Safety: you cannot recall an open model; guardrails can be fine-tuned away. Geoffrey Hinton compared open-sourcing big models to "being able to buy nuclear weapons at Radio Shack." This drove the SB 1047 fight (Newsom veto, Sept 2024).

Open as Commons

Public interest left: Mozilla is spending from $1.4B in reserves on an open source "rebel alliance" against OpenAI and Anthropic ("owners, not renters"), with the Public AI movement pushing publicly funded models and compute. But AI Now warns "open" models still run on Big Tech's compute.

The China Effect

DeepSeek (Jan 2025) made open models a geopolitical weapon. Chinese open models passed American ones in downloads (1.15B vs 723M by March 2026). The US response: OpenAI's gpt-oss, the ATOM Project — while Meta went proprietary ("the Great Re-Closing").

Why It Matters

Openness splits the allies (safety vs ethics camps); every regulation fight now contains an open source carve-out battle; the Tech Right borrows the left's "democratize AI" language. Read any open source claim with three questions:

  1. Open what — weights, data, code, or brand?
  1. Who profits?
  1. What regulation is this argument being used against?

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Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Scrambler 3: Surveillance and Flock Cameras

The Setup

Flock Safety runs 100,000+ AI license plate cameras across the US, an $8.4B company whose lead investor is a16z, which led Flock's $275M Series F in March 2025 at a $7.5B valuation via its American Dynamism fund. Flock integrates with Palantir, which holds a $30M ICE contract. Marc Andreessen joined the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board in June 2026. Nearly 800 cities signed new Flock contracts in 2026.

The Blowup

Local camera data flowed to ICE and federal agencies without authorization. Dayton's audit found its cameras searched 7,100+ times for immigration enforcement, explicitly against city policy. Ring ended its partnership with Flock in February 2026 following public backlash [VERIFY: cite]. An Illinois state audit found that CBP had been given access to Illinois plate data through a pilot program, forcing dozens of agencies off the state's data-sharing system [VERIFY: cite]. At least 53 cities across 20 states had canceled or rejected Flock contracts as of the EFF's verified count; independent trackers put the figure at 80 or more by mid-2026 [VERIFY: cite tracker]. Cities include Austin, Evanston, and Eugene.

Opposition from the Left

"It doesn't matter which company has its creepy cameras in your neighborhood, they all have the same problems: a lack of transparency, oversight, and regulation into how they collect, store, and use our data." — ACLU, whose national campaign is literally called "Get the Flock Out"

The EFF calls Flock's Nova product, which links plate data to personal information, a "surveillance panopticon."

Opposition from the Right

Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act restricting warrantless tracking; a bipartisan amendment would condition federal highway funds on banning license plate readers except for tolls; Newsweek now runs lists of Republicans cracking down on Flock.

The Schism

The Tech Right's money built the surveillance network; the MAGA base and progressives are fighting it city by city. For AI Populists this is the cleanest "who is in charge" story in AI politics: VC money → police cameras → ICE via Palantir.

Draft - In Review

Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Methodology, Caveats and Open Questions

How This Map Was Drawn

Factions are defined by shared beliefs, community infrastructure (funders, conferences, forums), and political behavior (money, endorsements, coalitions), building on Michel Justen's faction taxonomy, with original additions: the political money overlay, the AI Populists faction (from field feedback), and the issue-line analysis.

Caveats

  • Snapshot as of August 2026. PAC totals, alignments, and flashpoints move fast.
  • Factions are clusters, not cages. Individuals vary; orgs may dispute their placement.
  • Placements reflect public positions and funding, not private views.
  • Some fights are coalitional, not factional. On child safety and surveillance, the table shows positions, not alliances.

How the orgs we've placed would place themselves

We invite corrections. Placements reflect public positions and funding; private views may differ and this is not intended to suggest relationships between groups listed alongside each other.

What we're watching for/need to update for this guide:

National Security/International Cooperation

Not simply US/China competition, but also opportunities for international cooperation around safety, other international efforts

Labor placement

Where do AFL-CIO and the building trades belong? Some trades are pro-data-center jobs; some are funding safety efforts; there isn't a central alignment

The Shapers

Tracking the work of Jeff Dean et al. as a possible new faction as they build credibility but no public political infrastructure yet.

Child safety as the preemption vehicle

Watching whether the carve-out survives a real federal bill: KOSA, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act cleared Senate Commerce on August 5, 2026, and the open question is what preemption language rides along, and whether the age-verification split splinters the anti-preemption coalition.

Tech Right surveillance collision

Tracking the Tech Right's surveillance investments that could collide with its own voter base as the MAGA right is increasingly opposed to warrantless tracking.

Draft - In Review

Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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Sources and Further Reading

Primary Explainers

Interactive Maps

  • Mapping AI (mapping-ai.org/map) — ~1,800 people and orgs in US AI policy by stance and funding
  • CSET / MIT AI Risk Initiative — governance landscape taxonomy

Political Money and Flashpoints

  • NYT: "New Super PAC, the Guardrails Alliance, Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI" (June 2026)

Open Source and Surveillance

Child Safety and AI CSAM

Draft - In Review

Kate Gage, kate@cooperativeimpactlab.org

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