SAN FRANCISCO: Silicon Valley bosses who spent two years cosying up to US President Donald Trump now face a Democratic Congress already threatening subpoenas, after midterm elections in which antipathy towards artificial intelligence swayed voters.
“AI company CEOs should be called to testify under oath,” Greg Casar, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said on Tuesday.
Senator Ed Markey, for his part, warned tech executives they would need to “plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing”.
It is a cold shower for tech bosses who rallied behind Trump after his 2024 win, with Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and others front and centre at his January 2025 inauguration.
Musk went furthest, spending more than US$250 million to help elect Trump and then taking charge of his DOGE cost-cutting drive. He poured nearly half a billion dollars more into backing Republicans in the midterms.
Once they take control of both chambers on Jan 3, Democrats will control the committees that can compel executives to testify or hand over internal documents under threat of prosecution.
In 2020, the heads of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google were called to answer for their market dominance.
Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — one of Trump’s closest advisers on AI — could now face the same ordeal.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, elected senator for Michigan despite more than US$5 million being spent against him by America PAC, the political committee funded by Musk, wants to go further.
He is calling for a “full-on pause” in the development of the most powerful AI systems and a US-China treaty to “pause and ban superintelligence”, meaning AI that would surpass human intelligence.
To pass legislation, however, lawmakers will need to rally a party divided on the issue and overcome Trump’s veto. He remains president until January 2029.
No major tech boss had commented on the election as of Thursday except Musk, who joked: “Data centres in space looking pretty appealing right now.”
Parts of the industry had begun distancing themselves from Republicans before the vote.
The main pro-AI political fund, financed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — one of whose co-founders backed Trump in 2024 — received no new donations from April through the end of September, as public distrust of AI grew.
Meta has hired former Democratic staffers in recent months to represent it in Congress, according to Axios.
‘Shapeshifters’
Criticism is also coming from the Republican side.
“Voters are primed to reward whichever political party delivers on holding Big Tech accountable,” Daniel Cochrane, a senior fellow at the conservative Institute for Family Studies, told AFP.
“In this election, concerns about AI’s social and economic impacts shifted votes,” he said, pointing to data centres as well as AI’s effects on jobs and children.
According to an NBC News exit poll, AI and data centres were “a crucial or a major factor” for 56 per cent of voters in their choice for Congress.
“Let’s not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate,” said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, an influential centrist coalition funded by major tech companies.
“There’s only one thing that sinks the US economy, it’s the AI trade,” and “the only way to sink the AI trade is to sink the data centres,” Chamath Palihapitiya warned during an election-night livestream of the All-In podcast, which he co-hosts with other prominent pro-Trump Silicon Valley investors.
Even market analyst Dan Ives, known for his bullish outlook on tech growth, now estimates that 10 per cent of the 800 to 1,000 new data centres planned in the United States “will not happen”.
“The tech bros are shapeshifters,” said Cochrane, who expects Zuckerberg “to have another mea culpa” before an “aggressive Dem Congress”.
“Ultimately, the tech bros are for the tech bros,” he said.