The AI Backlash Gets Professional

I f there’s one thing America seems to agree on, it’s AI.

Some three-quarters of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area, three-quarters of Americans think AI will hurt their job security, nearly 70 percent think the technology is advancing too quickly—the polls go on.

Progressive and Republican candidates alike are bashing the tech industry to win primary elections.

States and cities are halting plans for data-center development.

Yet in cloistered San Francisco, where I live, staffers at OpenAI and Anthropic are developing this same feared technology at light speed and pulling down compensation packages that stretch to considerably more than $1 million.

Silicon Valley’s growth is largely unencumbered by regulation, and President Trump’s administration has if anything used its authority to speed the AI industry along.

The divide between these camps—the majority of people in this country who simply have to deal with the technology as it’s rolled out, and the much smaller population of people with direct influence over it—is a defining feature of this era.

And so I noticed when a small group, with ties to both the Bay Area and Washington, started making noise, insisting that the AI race slow down and the technology be overseen not by executives and engineers, but by the broadest population possible.

The group—which formally launched today and calls itself Irreplaceable, as in people are irreplaceable by machines —has an audacious and perhaps naive vision.

It is essentially a protest against capitalism as it is practiced in America today, focused on resisting first and developing a coherent plan for the future later.

I have seen exactly how bulletproof the AI companies are—pilfering seemingly infinite volumes of media to train their models, building unpermitted power plants for their data centers, and unleashing autonomous agents capable of massive security breaches, almost entirely without consequence .

I wanted to meet with Irreplaceable’s founders to ask: How do they possibly expect to pull this off? [ Read: It may be time to panic about AI ] The organization is staffed with people who made a name for themselves in the climate movement, and they are hoping to avoid past mistakes by focusing on the emotional reaction Americans are having to AI, rather than anchoring their work in white papers and policy recommendations.

“People get it,” Jeremy Ornstein—a campaign strategist for Irreplaceable and former organizer with the Sunrise Movement—told me.