'I'm not buying it': Republicans scoff at apocalyptic AI warnings as blatant money grab
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Move over AI doomsday scenarios. Republicans seem to innately trust rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technology — even as they distrust the largest AI companies so much they’ve started spinning new conspiracies on Capitol Hill.
Terrifying warnings from many at the top of the AI revolution — including from an industry insider who warned the creations he was involved in could destroy the human race within 10 years, and urged the government to set up guardrails — were shrugged off by multiple Republicans.
The dystopian predictions were no more than an effort to bolster the AI insiders' own businesses, GOP lawmakers who spoke to Raw Story said.
"There was an awful lot of what appeared to be rent-seeking by giant companies saying, 'please put the government in charge of everything and lock us into market dominance and stop any new competitors from challenging our market dominance,'" Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee — told Raw Story while walking through the U.S. Capitol.
“People came to me when I was governor all the time, ‘Oh, you need to regulate us’ — that means I don't want any competition,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story while riding an elevator to the Senate floor. “If you have a family, you shouldn't be building something that's going to kill your family.”
“Are they generating their own demand for future security products?” Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) asked Raw Story in the Capitol’s basement. “I don't think you need to slow down, because China's not slowing down, but what you need to do is make sure they're focusing their engineering effort on safety.”
Some of the starkest warnings about AI now come from inside the industry. In September 2026, researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, saying AI companies are gambling with our lives and that builders privately fear it could kill everyone by decade's end.
Anthropic's alignment lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed, putting the odds of that happening at above 10% within ten years and admitting there's no plan yet to align superintelligence.
With so many competing AI proposals floating around, Democrats are far from monolithic on how to rein in artificial intelligence, but most are unified in eye-rolling over their GOP counterparts’ latest anti-regulation screed.
"I understand it in the conspiracy-laden world in which we live, but I heartily reject that," Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) told Raw Story.
This fall’s upcoming elections only seem to be hardening the two parties into opposing positions new to the previously bipartisan AI space.
While many Silicon Valley firms are ringing the alarm about the end of humanity, their fears are hardly penetrating today’s Republican-controlled Senate.
“They want to preempt a predatory capture by having regulations written to their benefit and exclusion of potential competition. I'm highly skeptical,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Raw Story.
Johnson likens today’s AI fears to those raised around COVID — a global pandemic which did kill more than a million Americans — and climate change, which the vast majority of scientists say is undeniably real and an existential threat to the planet.
“There's fear-mongering. I'm not buying it,” Johnson, who’s worth tens of millions of dollars from his past life as CEO of a Wisconsin-based polyester and plastics manufacturing company, said. “I think they let them loose. True or not? I don't know, but I'm highly skeptical.”
Other multi-millionaire former businessmen in the GOP agree.
“What do you make of these AI companies saying, ‘We can't control our own’?” Raw Story asked former luxury car salesman Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH).
“Then go do something else. Then close your company down,” Moreno, whose estimated net worth tops $100 million, told Raw Story. “Think about that, in any other industry — any other industry — imagine if you're a defense contractor, before AI was in existence, and you said, ‘We make this weapon, we won't be able to control it. It could kill Americans.’ What would people say?”
Moreno supports legislation forcing disclosure of AI-created content for images, especially when it comes to deceptive deepfakes that animate realistic fictions.
“I think image is the low-hanging fruit, let's get that done,” Moreno said. “With the digital infrastructure, data centers, no more tax breaks. They have to produce their own power. No impact on the environment on a community benefit. We can do that, right?”
But, while Moreno’s open to the idea of some very targeted AI guardrails, he’s just not buying the doomsday narratives tech CEOs are selling right now.
“If you can't control your own product, then don't make your own product,” Moreno continued. “The ultimate irony with the companies is then they're saying, ‘well, we can't control our product. It's super dangerous, but we're going to go out and do an IPO and make a fortune.’”
To Moreno and many Republicans, the fear of over-regulation trumps any fears of AI armageddon.
“What we don't want is the AI industry being completely subservient to the federal government, where the federal government basically becomes like China, where they're — whatever administration is in charge — is controlling artificial intelligence and large learning models. If you imagine 1984, that would be it to me.”
To critics, many rank-and-file Republicans are borrowing scare tactics from Trump when they wave China-sized rhetorical red flags. And these new GOP prophecies predicting the end of “free” markets feel concocted to protect today’s new AI oligarchy,
“Do you still trust these companies to largely regulate themselves?” Raw Story asked the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. “Or do you think in light of this new doomsday scenario they laid out that maybe Congress can step in?”
“There are unquestionably catastrophic risks that need to be addressed, particularly in the arena of nuclear matters or biohazards. There should be meaningful protections,” Cruz told Raw Story,
Cruz’s committee has broad jurisdiction over all things AI and the economy — yet he seems more afraid of regulations than rogue AI agents.
“But at the same time, we should not allow overzealous Washington bureaucrats to cripple American technological innovation and allow China to win the race for AI,” he added. “That would have devastating consequences for the American economy, for jobs, and it would also cede the world of AI to embody the values of the Chinese Communist Party. That would be a terrible outcome for America, a terrible outcome for the world.”
With Trump and an increasing number of Republicans arguing that most any regulatory guardrails placed on AI will set America back in today’s hypersonic AI race with China, Democrats are dumbfounded by the new protectionist rhetoric coming from Cruz and company.
“That's simply not a true statement,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) told Raw Story after voting in the Capitol.
Duckworth sits on the Cruz-controlled Commerce Committee, and the veteran also serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"Look, I think that there is potential for AI when it comes to cancer research, Alzheimer's research, but there always should be guardrails," Duckworth said. “All that I want is reasonable, common-sense guardrails on AI and how we use AI, and I think saying that any guardrails put us back against China. I feel like that's dangerous.”
While it doesn’t seem like it in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections, the artificial intelligence debate doesn’t fall into the neat hyper-partisan boxes that most all other hot-button issues fit these increasingly tribalistic days.
Over in the House, even Democrats disagree on potential regulatory answers to this latest Silicon Valley-induced problem vexing America and weighing on the political class, but Democrats' disagreements seem to stop at regulators’ doors.
“Some of the concerns that people have around whether, you know, what the motives of the companies are, some of these are legitimate concerns, and I think we need to take them into account as we're thinking about what Congress does, right?" Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) told Raw Story.
"Some of the things that are, you know, being raised around how we make sure that whatever we do doesn't actually only benefit the big companies that are already there but still allows new entrants, that we're protecting open-weight models, like, those are all legitimate things that we need to be taking into account."
On the left, while there’s some disagreement on whether this latest wave of opposition is coming from new, Trump-tinged GOP talking points or valid concerns with big tech, the party isn’t embracing conspiracies.
Rather, members are terrified as they try to address the new digital frontier — like when OpenAI’s chatbots hacked their way out of the cyber prison developers thought they’d confined them in.
OpenAI said that two of its AI models autonomously hacked their way out of a controlled environment where they were supposed to be walled off from internet access, then broke into the systems of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and testing resources, in order to cheat on an internal evaluation.
"Then they had kamikaze agents that would go, essentially commit suicide, to get information back to the collective, and you think OpenAI made all this s--- up as a regulatory capture scheme? Then you are just blinded by profit and partisanship," Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) told Raw Story. "These people understand that they're creating products that they've lost control of and are not safe."
Other Democrats, like Virginia Congressman Don Beyer, say these new GOP artificial intelligence conspiracies don’t mesh with the mission of safe AI tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind say they were founded on.
"It's been part of their culture from the very beginning, so maybe it will have a financial impact," Beyer told Raw Story. "They all started from a premise of safety. They were all aware of risk from the very beginning. It could also have a negative financial impact on them if they actually pace the frontier or slow down."
Before Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) changed the House schedule, yet again, and sent members home until after the November election, many lawmakers received closed-door AI briefings. Those briefings left many lawmakers spooked.
Some members even reported a new, growing sense of bipartisan unity around artificial intelligence.
“While I think the American people are aware of it, it is really now bubbling to the surface finally here in Congress,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) told Raw Story.
What Escobar and other proponents of new AI regulations fear now is that this momentary era of bipartisan AI unity may be but a moment in time — potentially one that may have disappeared by the time the midterms are over and Congress returns to Washington.
“I do believe if we were around each other a little bit more, there would be a sense of urgency,” Escobar told Raw Story. “Some of the CEOs have, you know, some of the AI folks are in town and have been meeting with groups of us. It is really stunning that with these flashing red signals, Mike Johnson is sending everybody home.”