The Leftist Split Over AI Doom

On September 10, two days after researcher Jacob Coxon, who had recently quit his job at Anthropic, sounded the alarm about the industry potentially bringing about the end of humanity, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America posted a carousel of images on Instagram. The first slide was a drawing of an ouroboros—a dragon eating its own tail—set against a hot pink background. “AI alarmism and AI hype are the same story: both keep your attention on a science-fiction future to distract you from the real harms experienced in the present,” the image reads.

The post was authored by the NYC DSA’s Tech Action Working Group, which focuses on tech regulation issues for the chapter, the largest in the country. It garnered more than 25,000 likes on Instagram. But not everyone agreed with the post: “Horrible and dangerous take,” one comment reads. “Sometimes sounding the alarm is justified.”

As politicians scramble to understand AI safety, an ideological split is opening on the American left. Among the questions it’s centered on is whether to believe tech companies’ claims that their products are so powerful that they could end the world.

Some on the left question the value in elevating theoretical concerns about AI over actual harms. They believe repeating claims promoted by the frontier labs about the dangers of AI empowers the AI companies, turning attention away from regulating the current harms of the technology and toward an impossible future.

“AI has become the latest tool of capitalist exploitation. The damage that unregulated and misused AI is already causing is clear across the country,” Alan Deng, a member of Tech Action, tells WIRED. “As socialists, we don’t trust these corporations to craft their own regulations.”

“Some of us are looking at Bernie and saying, what happened?” one NYC DSA member with a tech background tells WIRED.

Barusubramanian says that, if nothing else, they’re “happy that everyone is talking about AI now.”