loading
loading
Democratic and Republican voters agree that the American public should decide the future of AI development, not billionaires in Silicon Valley, according to new polling shared first with Semafor. The poll was commissioned for a new organization launched by Alex Bores, who made a name for himself as a top target of the AI industry in his failed bid for Congress in New York. Though AI ranked last on a list of 13 issues that 1,502 registered voters polled this month said they care about, half said AI is moving too fast and 86% identified lack of regulation as a problem. Only 18% of those polled think the US falling behind China competitively is a problem, a risk President Donald Trump has cited in opposing regulation. While just 36% polled said they had heard about incidents like the Hugging Face hack, “support for reasonable regulations is actually quite correlated with all these other issues,” Bores told Semafor Tuesday in Washington on the sidelines of the “pro-human” summit attended by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Steve Bannon. The poll’s results, Bores argued, show that “if you show good work on AI, you’re winning over voters, even though AI isn’t their top issue.” Bores’ new organization, Who Decides, aims to help the broader Democratic coalition unite around a “shared baseline” for AI protections. The organization will help traditionally Democratic groups like labor and civil society craft AI policy messages, Bores said. “As a Democrat, I say this with love, but we turn everything into a circular firing squad, and I think it’s really, really important that on this issue, where we have powerful, well-resourced enemies that don’t want there to be any regulation whatsoever, that we are all on the same tea,” he said.
document fetched 2026-09-17 02:49 · canonical https://semafor.com/article/09/16/2026/the-public-wants-a-say-in-ai-development