As Donald Trump and his regime desperately try to stop states from regulating artificial intelligence companies — some of which Trump has personally invested in — his administration is apparently classifying some tech critics as potential terrorists.
Several of my MS NOW colleagues have reported on Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice into an illiberal — and broadly inept — tool that he has used to target the MAGA movement’s perceived political enemies. And that reporting is relevant context for a new WIRED report that spotlights the Trump administration’s fixation on AI skeptics.
The report examines hundreds of pages of documents, which haven’t been independently reviewed by MS NOW:
In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists. More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat. … A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.
Obviously, any organization legitimately plotting violent terror should be disrupted. It’s also obvious that the Trump administration would have more credibility on the counterterrorism front if not for the fact that Trump pardoned more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters last year in one of his first acts as president. But in reality, Trump and members of his administration have openly flaunted and acted upon their fantasies of using the DOJ to target liberals and anti-fascists. And lawmakers and reporters alike have sounded the alarm on the administration’s plans to target what it calls “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Americanism,” so no one should be confident in the Trump DOJ’s ability or interest in differentiating a so-called extremist from an everyday American with reasonable concerns about Big Tech overreach. Also of note here is the Trump administration’s apparent disinterest in targeting what prior administrations, including Trump’s first administration, identified as the biggest national security threat in the United States: white supremacist terrorism.
So, by all appearances, the functionally racist Trump regime is abandoning the federal government’s emphasis on thwarting racist extremism while leaning in to its focus on classifying and targeting so-called anti-tech extremists.
The FBI told WIRED in a statement that the bureau “investigates individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security,” and added that it had “no additional comment.” The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Trump has tried, and failed, on numerous occasions to bar states from regulating AI companies. One might argue this emphasis on anti-tech extremism by the DOJ is one way to help quell dissent — dissent that could pose an obstacle to Trump and his Big Tech benefactors like Elon Musk.
But efforts to portray AI skeptics as major threats to the public may be doomed by the fact that AI skepticism is so widespread. An NBC News poll in March found a majority of registered voters surveyed think the risks of AI tools outweigh their potential benefits.
Meanwhile, the broad coalition of Big Tech critics — that is, people who could presumably find themselves on the federal government’s radar as a result of this supposed crackdown on anti-tech “extremism” — has been demonstrably bipartisan and includes a bunch of MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.