The House Article | Rage Against The Machine: How Long Before The US ‘Techlash’ Spreads?

‘March Against The Machines’ protest outside Google’s London headquarters in February 2026 (Ron Fassbender/Alamy)

6 min read19 May

The next US presidential election may be more than two years away, but the jostling to become the Democratic candidate is well under way, and Gavin Newsom’s success at turning Donald Trump’s social media game against him with mocking ALLCAPS tweets has put him at the front of the pack.

Critics have identified a potential problem with California’s governor, however – he is, they say, far too close to Silicon Valley’s leaders.

Given how far-reaching and fast-acting the changes wrought by AI are likely to be, some think the next US presidential race will be fought as the so-called techlash becomes significant.

Already, another senior Democrat has put himself at the head of the rebellion. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, has lambasted Newsom for opposing new taxes and regulations on big tech.

Sanders is also benefiting from a growing voter backlash over the proliferation of data centres – the physical infrastructure that AI needs to power its tools – across the country.

The impact on rural areas in the US might even be a factor in the mid-terms, some commentators believe, weakening Republican support in some heartland areas the Democrats are looking to flip in their effort to seize control of Congress.

“A few months ago, when I proposed a moratorium on AI data centres, it was perceived as a radical, fringe and Luddite idea”, Sanders said recently. “Well, not any more.”

Twelve US states are now considering data centre moratoriums, with over 50 passed in towns, cities and counties locally.

In the UK the issue is, as yet, more muted, but there are already Cabinet tensions over how far the government should go to accommodate the energy-hungry centres.

So far the protests have been tiny – but government insiders can see what is happening in the US and worry the movement could spread.

Ministers – and data centre developers – are keen to emphasise the upsides, such as clean jobs in post-industrial areas. In a data centre, there is little risk of a life-changing injury – it is not physically punishing work, nor is it something that requires extensive training.

But providing sufficient energy is a challenge and the government was forced to acknowledge that it wrongly gave planning permission to a £1bn redevelopment of a landfill site in Buckinghamshire because they had not adequately assessed electricity demand stemming from the new data centre.

Foxglove, an activist legal firm also campaigning on data centres, believes the government has failed to account for a growth in data centres in its energy and emissions plans.

Tim Squirrell, head of strategy at Foxglove, tells The House: “The government doesn’t seem to have a clue what it’s doing about data centre emissions. There is no way that projected emissions can fit in the carbon budget without serious changes, but so far neither DSIT nor DESNZ seem willing to acknowledge there’s any trade-off between building hyperscale data centres and delivering on our net-zero commitments.”

Opposition to data centres in the UK may so far be low key, but there is a chance that it will grow and merge with other building concerns around tech – from social media use among children to the access to NHS data.

When I proposed a moratorium on AI data centres, it was perceived as a radical, fringe idea… Well, not any more

Elon Musk’s forays into UK politics – backing Tommy Robinson, for instance – have done little to improve public perception of US tech leaders. The dealings of Peter Thiel’s company, Palantir, with the UK state, including the NHS, are almost as controversial. The huge wealth and influence of a small group of Americans is only going to grow.

And then there is the spectre of AI-driven job losses as evidence mounts of a dramatic collapse of entry-level posts in some industries especially vulnerable to automation from the new technology.

Given the scale of the coming impact, some of the political discourse around AI can seem almost touchingly naive – touching that is, if it weren’t so important.

Speaking from an autonomous car juddering forward outside Parliament, Tech Secretary Liz Kendall recently admitted she didn’t use AI for work. “I use AI personally rather than at work, I’ve got to be honest. I’m much more likely to use it in my personal life,” she told Newsnight’s Matt Chorley, interviewing her from the front seat of a somewhat cramped saloon car.

Her predecessor, Peter Kyle, does use AI but found that his prompts were subject to Freedom of Information requests.

MPs like Mark Sewards who have experimented with AI to deliver constituency casework have found it to be a bruising experience. While the chatbot Sewards created was ultimately jettisoned in December due to the burden it placed on his staff, Sewards strikes an optimistic tone about balancing the benefits of progress and listening to the growing transatlantic tech backlash.

“A lot of the fear is based on very real observations of the power of tech to influence politics in a negative way; just look at what social media has done to us over the last 20 years,” he says.

“We’ve got to strike a balance between regulation and innovation. It’s one of the reasons I support innovating more with AI, while at the same time lifting the age of access to social media to 16.

“But the AI revolution is happening, whether we embrace it or not. So we should do everything we can to make it work in our favour.”

There is no doubt that AI can help with the business of politics itself. Ben Guerin, furious about tax rises against pubs, asked the AI agent Claude to workshop an idea he had: using Valuation Office Agency data, could a map of the upcoming business rate rises be built?

A lot of the fear is based on very real observations of the power of tech to influence politics in a negative way

Guerin is far from a political lightweight. Having worked under the tutelage of Lynton Crosby, he launched his own social media-savvy advertising agency in 2016, before becoming a close adviser to Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election campaign. He told the Telegraph that while AI can’t do the imaginative side of political campaigns, it can do just about everything else.

Upon launching, the site took off. Within 24 hours it had been viewed 100,000 times. Soon, tools to organise a crawl around the worst impacted pubs in your local area were added, and before long the government announced a U-turn on the changes.

Similarly, Lord Kempsell enabled AI to support his work campaigning against the Chagos deal including aiding his FOI requests, which revealed the FCDO ‘Chagossian contact group’ had never met after it was announced, and that the Prime Minister’s adviser Jonathan Powell had begun work on a deal before being formally appointed.

But while AI adoption may soon become essential for political campaigners, the irony is that those campaigns may increasingly be fought in the context of voter resentment at the disruption the technology will bring in its wake.