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OPINION:
Recently at the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly jeered when he spoke about artificial intelligence. Similar AI-related remarks drew boos at the University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University.
These scenes capture a growing mood among young Americans: AI is not a tool to master but a threat to resist.
China could hardly ask for more. Every hour that the U.S. spends debating AI is an hour China spends mastering it. While Chinese schools expand AI education programs, American public discourse increasingly frames AI as a source of societal problems — a narrative that translates into political pressure to slow investment in innovation.
China’s data centers are presented as green modernization; America’s are presented as social pain.
The anti-AI backlash is driven largely by two fears: first, that AI will destroy jobs, and second, that the infrastructure powering it will burden households. Both concerns contain a kernel of truth.
AI is disproportionately affecting entry-level positions. Data centers are costly. Still, the evidence does not support the apocalyptic conclusions.
The national unemployment rate was 4.3% in April, below the postwar average of 5.66%. Yes, recent graduates are under pressure; New York Fed data recently put their unemployment rate near 5.7%.
Yet the same research found no clear evidence that AI alone is to blame. In fact, the divergence in hiring for AI-exposed occupations predates ChatGPT, and firms surveyed by the Fed reported plans that focused more on retraining and workflow adaptation than on wholesale workforce reductions.
The same pattern appears in the AI-infrastructure debate. The Department of Energy reported that data centers consumed about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could reach 6.7% to 12% by 2028, placing growing pressure on power generation, affordable consumer rates and energy security.
Infrastructure building also creates jobs and boosts economic activity. From 2016 to 2023, domestic data center employment rose from 306,000 to 501,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Counties that host their first large data centers report rises in private employment by 4% to 5% over five to six years, according to the Brookings Institution.
Yet recently, more than 230 groups — including Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace and Physicians for Social Responsibility — called for a pause on the building of data centers, describing them as “one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation.”
CodePink — a nonprofit known for campaigns opposing military intervention and its “China Is Not Our Enemy” initiative — has similarly portrayed AI infrastructure as dangerous. (Meanwhile, the group has drawn attention for its ties to businessman Neville Roy Singham, who is said to have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.)
The shift is more consequential when it shapes politics. The Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, introduced by Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, in March, aims to “slow down the development of AI to give democracy a chance to catch up.”
This is a departure from the American permissionless innovation — build first, correct specific harms when necessary — toward a precautionary system in which technological progress must wait for political approval.
In April, Mr. Sanders hosted a forum called “The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation,” featuring Xue Lan of Tsinghua University, a key institute of China’s advanced technology ecosystem, and Zeng Yi of the Beijing Institute for AI Safety and Governance.
The discussion emphasized uncontrolled AI races and insufficient international collaboration.
Chinese institutions continue to accelerate AI development while Chinese experts warn American policymakers against it. The contradiction is difficult to ignore, particularly when estimates place China just three to six months behind the American frontier.
At that distance, U.S. hesitation is a strategic advantage for China.
Slowing American innovation will not give graduates a labor market without AI. It will give them AI systems shaped elsewhere — most likely in China. A Chinese-led AI order would not protect graduates’ right to boo; it would normalize AI built for surveillance and censorship.
America does not have to choose between democracy and AI. It can enforce competition laws and demand affordable energy without surrendering the field. The real question is whether Americans shape the next AI era or inherit one shaped by China. Fear will not win that contest.
• Lilla Nora Kiss, Ph.D., is senior fellow for international affairs and academic integrity at the National Association of Scholars.
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