Artificial intelligence is a hungry species. It is designed to steal people’s livelihoods, hoard personal data, and devour enough energy and land to remake and ruin entire towns. Senator Bernie Sanders, long critical of the wealthy accumulating power at everyone else’s expense, has warned with increasing alarm that unregulated AI in the hands of tech oligarchs represents that process in its most radical, existential form. The AI revolution has the potential to dwarf the nineteenth-century industrial revolution in both impact and pace, and perhaps even to dominate human society. But its spoils are not poised to be shared with anyone but tech capitalists and other members of the economic ultraelite.

The executives and venture capitalists spearheading the expansion of AI technology have curried favor with a federal administration that is, so far, cutting them a blank check to build a network of massive data centers, even over the objections of some state and local governments. Among the planned data centers is a Meta facility that Mark Zuckerberg boasted would rival Manhattan in size. The staggering footprint of this infrastructure matches the scale of potential economic displacement; research compiled by Sanders’s staff on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee projects that AI-driven automation will severely hollow out the American workforce, potentially destroying nearly one hundred million jobs within a decade.

Last week, Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill to impose a federal moratorium on new AI data centers and on the export of AI chips to countries that do not sufficiently regulate the technology. The proposed moratorium would be lifted only after Congress passes comprehensive AI legislation that establishes safeguards to ensure “the safety and prosperity of the American people.” The Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act would also require the Department of Energy to collect and publish all financial, environmental, and operational data related to AI data centers. At the press conference to unveil the legislation, Sanders said: