Potential Democratic presidential candidates are scrambling to carve out their own lanes on artificial intelligence with renewed urgency, after months of laying low got blown up by last week’s spike in apocalyptic angst.
Possible 2028 candidates and their top staffers have sought advice from both Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who wants Democrats to back a temporary pause on AI development, and New York State Assembly member Alex Bores, who launched his own AI safety group this week, according to three people familiar with these private conversations. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a potential candidate, discussed AI regulations with Rep. Bill Foster (D-Illinois) at the Illinois Democratic Party dinner last week, according to a person familiar with the interaction.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who is also eyeing a 2028 campaign, could push for more legislative action in his state after signing an AI safety bill this summer, according to a person familiar with the governor’s thinking. On Thursday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is scheduled to give an AI-focused speech in Pittsburgh.
A flurry of memos started circulating among Democrats this week, as strategists sought further messaging guidance ahead of the midterms. One poll that made the rounds, obtained by The Washington Sun, found 60 percent of Americans believe the government should slow down AI development to make sure it’s safe, even if that meant China would catch up. The poll, conducted by Blue Rose Research for the Center for Shared AI Prosperity, found a majority of voters wanted to “pause development” of AI until “stronger safeguards exist.”
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The AI-focused blitz, from advice-seeking to message-framing research, is a marked departure for the potential 2028 candidates. For much of the last year, those same Democrats largely avoided weighing in on AI-related issues. In some cases, potential 2028 candidates have reversed course after initially leaning into more pro-AI positions around data center construction.
Democratic operatives now expect AI to dominate the 2028 primary debate, and the factions are starting to materialize.
“I’ve been getting calls from 2028 teams saying, ‘What the fuck should I do?’” said Rob Flaherty, an alum of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign who recently launched a super PAC, Tomorrow Together, to advise Democrats on AI policy. “Until this week, the incentives were to say nothing. If you said something, Big Tech would come in and kill you, and if you said nothing, it was safer. The mood went from, ‘don’t make any sudden moves,’ to ‘you need to be proactive on AI.’”
AI exploded into the political conversation over the last week, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly quit his job and said his former employer was “gambling with our lives.” His viral post triggered a cascade of responses, including an unprecedented call from the leaders of Anthropic and other AI companies for increased federal regulation and a slowdown in development. All these moves come just weeks after OpenAI acknowledged its AI agents went rogue and hacked into rival AI start-up Hugging Face.
“The people who are thinking of running for president realize how important this issue is and are doing all they can to get up to speed on it as quickly as possible, and because it changes so quickly, this isn’t something you can just cram for or study once,” Bores said. “This is an ongoing conversation, so I expect to have those continue and any way that we can help any of the potential Democratic nominees, we stand ready to help.”
Interviews with six advisers to potential 2028 candidates, who were granted anonymity to describe private discussions, said there are several concerns about AI, including a lack of knowledge about the technology and theoretical job losses, making it less clear what the best policy prescriptions might be. Others said the blockbuster political spending from AI-backed super PACs in Democratic primaries had a chilling effect on Democratic candidates pushing on the issue, both in 2026 and ahead of 2028.
“A lot of candidates have a default desire to tread carefully because the technology is so fast-moving, they don’t want to seem like a Luddite, and they also fear making an enemy out of an industry with deep pockets,” said one 2028 adviser, who pointed to the fact that most potential 2028 candidates have not joined Sen. Bernie Sanders in calling for a moratorium on AI. “But there’s a real opening for a candidate to stand out if they are willing to err on the side of being aggressive.”
Over the last week, Pritzker said it’s “time to sound the alarm” on AI, urging federal action, as did Shapiro. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a landmark child safety bill. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who wrote in June 2025 that “we are still underreacting on AI,” said it’s “deeply dangerous” for Congress to “sit on its hands.” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) said “not taking action on AI now is just plain dumb,” referring to President Donald Trump’s rejection of AI guardrails. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) called out the “tech lords” for not going “far enough” and argued for a “pause” on “recursive self improving AI.”
So far, there is a coalescing “consensus on values and posture, but not yet on how that translates into specific regulatory policy,” said one Democratic strategist involved in the discussions around AI and 2028. “The CEOs opened the door for that consolidation because the industry is signaling they’re open to it.”
But some divisions are emerging. Harris drew sharp criticism after praising a new effort, led by Democratic megadonor Ron Conway, to improve the relationship between Democrats and the AI industry, arguing the party needed to find a way to regulate AI “without sacrificing the technology’s benefits.”
“The problem is the outsized influence of the industry,” tweeted Democratic strategist Morris Katz, who called Harris’ tweet a “total misread.”
“Take them on,” he posted. “Don’t serve as an accomplice.”
Potential candidates have a range of ready-made options at their disposal for responding to voter angst. The most moderate ideas already in circulation include limiting state or federal tax breaks for data centers, imposing stricter disclosure of water and electricity usage and creating new programs to retrain workers displaced in the AI transition. Those policies would keep intact the basic structure of AI development.
At the other end of the spectrum are proposals to bring the frontier labs under direct government control or give the government a means to shut them down. Sanders has championed legislation to nationalize the frontier labs by having the government seize a majority of their equity — a step resisted thus far by most Democrats, including all of the potential 2028 candidates.
Democrats are also split over the best way to tax the frontier labs and the data centers that support them. Casar has proposed a tax on “tokens” that would charge AI companies based on how much computing power they use, ensuring that federal revenue rises the more the technology is adopted. Opponents of the idea say such a model would tax consumption, with a higher bill ultimately getting passed onto users.
Sanders’ nationalization plan would theoretically avoid that pitfall, but comes with challenges of its own, including the downside of tying government funding to keeping AI running.
The intensifying alarm in Washington has spurred greater interest in these more dramatic solutions, experts and congressional aides said. But even if potential candidates and their advisers are talking about them behind the scenes, not all are eager to discuss them publicly yet.
“Not every presidential candidate wants to take a stance on it,” said one Democratic strategist working on AI politics, who noted that AI wasn’t ever discussed during the last presidential primary in 2020. “I think it is a lot of ‘let’s see what happens over the next couple of weeks.’”
“But the reality is, the conversation about AI regulation is not going to go away,” the strategist said.
Part of what will make AI such a volatile campaign issue is its newness, party strategists said. Candidates have spent decades familiarizing themselves with issues like crime, the economy or culture war but might have learned about ChatGPT or Claude only since the last presidential election.
“I think if 2026 is going to be the midterm of data centers, 2028 is going to be the AI election,” said Ravi Mangla, spokesperson for the progressive Working Families Party. “Any serious candidate for 2028 is going to have a problem breaking out from the crowd without a comprehensive AI platform.”
The WFP earlier this year debuted its own AI policy platform, which called for a federal jobs program to help combat rising unemployment tied to the proliferation of the new technology.
Some strategists said they expect the AI political debate’s focus will soon shift from safety and data centers to job losses, with the potential to become the dominant issue in the presidential primary.
“This issue is designed in a lab to freak voters out,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC.
“People need to think about skating to where the puck is going,” he said. “And what is going to be tangible to the voter in 2028, at least to me, is it’s almost certainly going to be AI-related job losses and fears around AI job losses.”
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