Dan Osborn was finishing up his fourth town hall last Sunday, he says, when a “hardcore MAGA” guy approached him. Osborn, who is running for the US Senate in Nebraska as an independent against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, said that he and the man didn’t have much common ground—at first.
“Then I said, ‘Hey, what’s your take on AI and data centers?’” Osborn says. “Boy, right away, we were in lockstep, 100 percent agreement.”
Osborn is one of more than 15 politicians running for office in states across the country who have signed onto the AI Pact, a set of five promises around regulating both data centers and AI itself. As concerns about data centers have exploded in the midterm cycle, politicians are scrambling to respond to voters’ worries about their environmental impacts, the secrecy surrounding their construction, and the corporate power behind them. The new pledge is intended, according to its website, to provide “a needed baseline to ensure a humanity-first future.”
The pact is an offshoot of the Political Integrity Project, an anti-money in politics group that has a similar pledge for candidates. Daniel Lobo-Lewis, one of the founders, says that he and his other cofounders came up with the five promises in the AI Pact—which include advocating for mandatory safety reviews for AI models, supporting policies that would create an AI dividend for workers, and ensuring that consumers and companies can sue over harms caused by models—by networking with AI safety groups and other political organizations working on AI legislation. (Funding for the AI Pact is provided by a progressive political action committee, and no AI safety groups or tech companies are directly funding the initiative, Lobo-Lewis says.)
All of the pledge’s current signers, save for Osborn, are Democrats, although Lobo-Lewis emphasizes that it would welcome Republican signers. Some of the signers have built their campaigns around opposition to data centers and Big Tech, like Representative Justin Pearson, a Tennessee Democrat who rose to national prominence pushing back against pollution from SpaceX’s data centers, and Will Lawrence, a left candidate who won a competitive primary in Michigan in a district rife with data center opposition.
The pledge does not call for an explicit moratorium on data centers, but rather to “support policies that would ban tax breaks, backroom deals, and excessive energy usage for data centers.” This kind of measured language is intentional, Lobo-Lewis says, and intended to be a “floor” for candidates to sign on to—especially those with strong ties to labor. (Several labor unions have recently reaffirmed their support for data center construction.)
“Candidates in swing seats are laser-focused on affordability, creating jobs, and lowering costs,” says Alexander McCoy, a progressive strategist working on AI issues. “Some of them don’t necessarily want to say no to the possibility that a data center project can help with those things. At the same time, AI is expected to be incredibly disruptive unless guardrails are put in place. So is it worth it to create some construction jobs now, at the cost of destroying the opportunities available to other workers in your district?”
When I asked Osborn, a Navy veteran and labor leader, about where he falls on calling for a moratorium, he told me that data centers can provide “a lot of infrastructure and a lot of jobs.” But Osborn, who’s campaigning in rural areas where worried farmers are concerned about losing their land to development, also says that Congress needs to step in to regulate data centers.
“We’ve got to get this right,” he says. “Calling a time out right now doesn’t seem like a horrible thing.”