Former President Barack Obama is pushing Democrats to build their midterm and 2028 strategy around artificial intelligence regulation, a move conservatives warn is less about safety and more about expanding government control over the fastest-growing sector in the economy.
At a private fundraiser in New York City with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Obama urged the Democratic leader to make AI oversight the party's signature issue. Obama's office provided a partial transcript of his remarks to the New York Times, and the message was blunt: get ahead of AI or risk letting it become dangerous.
Obama told Jeffries directly that if Democrats win the House majority, AI should be their first order of business. "Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation," Obama said, as Breitbart News reported. He added: "This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don't get on top of it, I think can be dangerous."
Jeffries wasted no time echoing the former president. "President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence," Jeffries said in a statement. "Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people. We will not repeat their error."
The remarks were not a one-off. Obama has been working behind the scenes for months to shape the White House's approach to AI policy, a fact that both Obama's office and the White House confirmed to the Washington Examiner. That quiet involvement now appears to be going public, and going political.
The fundraiser with Jeffries was the latest in a series of moves. In March 2025, Obama gave a speech at Hamilton College in which he argued that "big disruptions" to the world like AI "require us to reorganize our societies." In May, he visited Toronto to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has employed American Democratic staffers as top advisers.
Obama also urged prospective 2028 presidential candidates to develop a "very clear plan" for AI and make it one of their "central agendas," Fox News reported. That framing, AI as a defining campaign issue, tracks with what the party's political infrastructure is already doing on the ground.
The House Majority PAC, a Jeffries-aligned political group spending tens of millions of dollars to help Democrats take the House in November, released a memo this month encouraging candidates to strike a "conspiratorial nerve" with voters on AI. The memo pushed Democrats to spread what the group itself described as conspiratorial theories about AI in order to defeat Republicans.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, widely seen as a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, made his own pitch at a rally this weekend. Ossoff called for a president who would "rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty." Questions have already emerged about Ossoff's approach to campaign rallies and whether his rhetoric is designed to inform voters or alarm them.
Left-leaning social media influencers praised Ossoff's remarks. The pattern is clear enough: Obama sets the framework, the party apparatus distributes the messaging, and ambitious Democrats audition for 2028 by repeating it.
Not everyone is buying what Obama and the Democrats are selling. Senior figures in the Trump administration have warned explicitly that the push for AI regulation is a vehicle for something much larger than consumer protection.
David Sacks, Trump's former AI czar, laid out the case in Breitbart News contributor Wynton Hall's book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI. Sacks argued that Republicans should understand that "hyperbolic and unproven claims" about potential AI job losses are "not an accident" but rather "part of an influence operation."
"The goal" is "to further 'Global AI Governance,' a massive power grab by the bureaucratic state and globalist institutions."
Sacks said the organizers behind global AI governance are "billionaires with a long history of funding left-wing causes and Trump hatred." He warned that while "it's fine to be concerned about a technology as transformational as AI," repeating their claims uncritically means "you may be falling for an AstroTurfed campaign by the 'AI Existential Risk Industrial Complex.'"
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who oversees much of the AI front for the current White House, framed the issue as a national security imperative at a recent Breitbart News event. "There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this," Bessent said. "If they were to pull away from us on AI, then nothing else would matter."
Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official overseeing AI implementation for the U.S. military, went further. He described the philosophical vision behind much of the AI safety movement as dystopian.
"It's a sort of dystopian, 'Brave New World' view of the world, where machines that are using 1s and 0s are going to have no bias and are going to decide the perfectly rational and best thing for everyone on Earth. It's a strange philosophical concept, and I don't think it's a place any normal person wants to live in."
Michael added that while AI companies have "distanced themselves" from the Effective Altruism movement that animated much of their early culture, "the detritus of that philosophy still lives inside these companies in my view."
The corporate side of the debate is just as revealing. Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, published a blog post titled "We Must Pace the Frontier" calling for a slowdown in AI development. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei wrote. "Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."
But Amodei's own post acknowledged the strategic risk. He said he agreed with Bessent "that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world." He warned that Chinese projects tied to the CCP "will run the alignment risks that U.S. companies are carefully preventing, and even if they avoid those risks, they will be in a position to militarily dominate democracies (for example with AI-driven drones)."
The contradiction sits in plain view. Amodei wants American companies to slow down while conceding that China will not. That tension is exactly what Trump administration officials have been flagging, and what they believe Democrats are either ignoring or exploiting for political advantage. The question of how figures like Obama accumulate influence and wealth after leaving office only sharpens the skepticism about whose interests these frameworks actually serve.
Wynton Hall's Code Red, published months ago, anticipated much of what is now unfolding. Hall wrote that "Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama are eager to leverage both real and imagined AI job losses to press for Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a four- or three-day workweek."
Hall called those proposals "fanciful" but "dangerous nonetheless, because elites will seize even greater control over our lives because of the liberties we gave up in exchange." He argued that "very powerful and highly organized leftists have built a massive echo chamber designed to amplify and stoke public fears about AI job losses, regardless of whether they are minimal or maximal."
The end goal, Hall wrote, is that "billionaire tech elites hope the public will cede greater decision-making and regulatory authority to them and groups such as the United Nations, WEF, and others to ensure 'AI safety' and mitigate existential risks." The United Nations and the World Economic Forum, institutions with no democratic accountability to American voters, are the intended beneficiaries of that handoff.
A Fox News poll found that 70% of registered voters opposed construction of AI data centers in their communities, a data point that suggests real public anxiety about AI's footprint. Democrats clearly see an opening in that anxiety. The question is whether their proposed solution, more regulation, more international frameworks, more bureaucratic oversight, would protect American workers or simply transfer power to the very institutions that have spent years trying to constrain American sovereignty.
Obama's track record on multilateral frameworks is not reassuring. He pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, both of which failed. His predecessor Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, which Trump replaced with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term. The pattern is consistent: Democratic presidents reach for sprawling international agreements, and American workers end up holding the short end. The broader shifts inside the Democratic Party have done nothing to break that pattern.
Ossoff's call for an "AI treaty" and Obama's push for a "framework" that would reorganize societies fit neatly into that tradition. So does the broader record of the Democratic establishment when it comes to accountability and follow-through.
AI is real, its disruptions are real, and serious people should debate how to handle both. But when a former president who failed at two major trade deals resurfaces to demand global governance over the most consequential technology of the century, and when the party's own political arm tells candidates to play on conspiracy fears to win elections, the agenda deserves more scrutiny than applause.
