The vibe shift surrounding AI and robotics heading into 2026 is palpable.
Accelerationists have lost control of the conversation, though no replacement consensus has emerged. Backlash toward AI’s deepening presence in daily life is intensifying as tech firms warn that slowing progress carries major national-security implications.
For both sides, the stakes are existential, which leaves little room for restraint. With massive profits and people’s livelihoods on the line, rational debate gives way to fear and urgency. There’s one near certainty for the coming year: Things will get really nasty.
Zeitgeist Swap
Artificial intelligence stole the zeitgeist from COVID when OpenAI made ChatGPT widely available in November 2022. A few weeks later, the techno-horror thriller M3GAN crystalized the shift in pop culture. Early 2023 was a shock-to-normalization phase for AI, where excitement largely outweighed fear. In a lot of ways, it mirrored early COVID in its social rules. Just like questioning public-health measures in 2020 was morally suspect, AI skepticism was reframed as denial and resistance to progress.
Those early days are gone, and they’re not coming back. The public mood has shifted from uneasily embracing the technology under pressure, to cautiously criticizing it, to an openly hostile “fuck AI” mindset. A recent Yahoo/YouGov poll shows that 53 percent of Americans now think AI is likely to destroy humanity.
Tech leaders worked overtime throughout 2025 to accelerate the shift in sentiment. They got caught up in a weird moment as President Trump made AI acceleration central to his second term’s economic and national-security agenda. They swung from left-leaning to MAGA adjacent basically overnight as Silicon Valley’s “Move Fast and Break Things” mantra was tolerated, and even encouraged, from the highest levels of government. They applauded as Trump rolled back Biden’s AI safety guardrails, fast-tracked permitting, and took steps to prevent states from enforcing their own regulations.
In their own bubble, they took on forms unrecognizable from their former personas. Elon Musk famously wielded a chainsaw on stage to mock laid-off federal workers. Mark Zuckerberg shed the moral posture that defined Meta’s post-Cambridge Analytica era. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bragged about firing thousands of workers and replacing them with AI agents. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised AI would make humans increasingly irrelevant to the future of work and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted the technology would eliminate half of entry-level jobs in a few years.
Big Tech is entering 2026 in a fundamentally defensive posture. While AI remains the engine, it’s increasingly framed indirectly. They’re banking on robotics, the space economy, longevity, or maybe the Antichrist, grabbing the culture’s attention. What they’re unprepared for is the possibility that anti-technology itself becomes the zeitgeist.
Datacenter Moratorium
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) closed 2025 by calling for a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new AI datacenters. In a video address, he said the build-out of AI infrastructure is happening too fast for public policy to keep up. The senator, who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, said pausing the advancements is necessary to ensure the technology benefits more than tech billionaires.
“This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing and make sure that the benefits of these technologies work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on Earth,” Sanders said in a video published on YouTube.
The reaction so far suggests broader political and cultural support than tech leaders expected, even if the idea remains controversial in the Beltway. In communities across the US, residents and local officials are resisting hyperscale datacenter projects over concerns about energy use, water supply, traffic, and environmental impact.
Tech leaders and investors have predictably dismissed the idea as anti-progress and potentially dangerous amid a technological arms race with China. Still, they’re clearly picking up on the vibe shift and taking steps to mitigate. On a recent episode of the All-In Podcast, the hosts agreed that tech firms should do more to improve the lives of Americans like industrial leaders from generations past.
“Enough of the stupid haircuts, dumb watches, ugly clothes, ostentatious displays of wealth,” co-host Chamath Palihapitiya said. “We’ve all done it. I’ve done it. It has to stop. Absolutely stop. And instead, we need to start to use a percentage of the balance sheets of these companies in order to benefit as many Americans as possible.”
Bipartisan Unity
Every day, backlash against AI is becoming less partisan. Instead of a left vs. right battle, the divide is between elite acceleration and popular skepticism.
Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, a Republican, has proposed a so-called Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights that would impose consumer protections, require transparency when people interact with AI, strengthen safeguards for children, limit the use of personal data and likenesses without consent, and grant local community leaders more authority to block or regulate large AI datacenters. The framework would also prohibit companies from passing the costs of datacenter expansions onto residents and ban subsidies and public incentives for Big Tech infrastructure.
Desantis, a frequent Trump critic, finds himself strangely aligned with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The two took polar opposite approaches during the pandemic, when California enacted the nation’s strictest measures while Florida became the symbol for resistance to lockdowns and mask mandates. Like Desantis, Newsom will likely spend much of 2026 battling the federal government over his state’s authority over AI and robotics. It gives them both a national stage leading up to the 2028 election; neither has confirmed, but it’s hard to imagine them not running.
Meanwhile in Washington, Republican lawmakers have been pushing back against Trump’s AI executive actions. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) has joined Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (R-Conn.) introducing the Guidelines for User Age Verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act, which would ban AI companions for minors, require chatbots to disclose they aren’t human, and establish criminal liability for AI systems for generated content that’s sexually explicit or encourages self-harm. GOP legislators from Utah, South Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states have urged Congress to reject Trump’s moratorium on state laws, arguing that states should retain the right to regulate AI.
There are fewer reasons for Republicans to align with Trump heading the second year of his term. His January 2025 promises about ushering in a “golden age” of broad economic prosperity have so far not translated into a lived sense of improvement for most Americans. While official data shows the US economy has expanded, it hasn’t resulted in job growth and has mostly benefited the already wealthy.
Unless conditions improve quickly, Republican candidates in the 2026 midterm elections will have strong incentives to distance themselves from both Trump and Big Tech. The dynamic could make the contest about who is willing to push back more on AI oligarchs rather than arguing over how fast to deploy it.
War on Tech Billionaires
Tech leaders could find themselves very lonely as the coalition that once protected them thins out from all sides. Long before AI backlash, people generally disliked tech leaders, associating them with data abuse, social engineering, obscene wealth, and cultural detachment.
When US Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat who’s represented Silicon Valley in Congress since 2017, proposed a 5 percent tax on California residents worth over $1 billion, he triggered a visceral reaction from tech elites. Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Larry Page publicly threatened to reduce their ties to California. They said it’ll stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
“After blindly funding the left for years, Silicon Valley is finally realizing what time it is. Dinner time. And they’re on the menu,” David Sacks, a PayPal co-founder and Trump’s unofficial AI and cryptocurrency czar, said on X.
Khana, who’s enjoyed strong backing from the tech sector, doesn’t seem to care about losing their support heading into an election year. He defended his proposal as necessary as Silicon Valley powerbrokers reacted angrily and hinted at a primary challenge. The Congressman has likely done the calculus and figured out he’s safe. The reality is: Most workers in SV aren’t wealthy and are unlikely to side with someone chosen by their boss who already makes them feel replaceable.
“I echo what FDR said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, ‘I will miss them very much,'” he said on X, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous October 1936 speech near the end of his re-election bid that he won decisively.
Robot Push Meets Robot Tax
Like Big Tech, the Trump Administration is shifting its focus toward embodied AI heading into the New Year. According to Politico, companies like Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Tesla have lobbied the White House to craft a national robotics strategy to counter China’s growing dominance.
“We’re going to have a lot of robots helping us because we need it,” Trump said in recent remarks on accelerating shipbuilding. “We’re going to need the help of robotics and other forms of, I guess you could say, employment. We’re going to be employing a lot of artificial things.”
Though the robotics sector is preparing for a surge of investments, it’s unclear how stable the policy environment will be. The general public is nowhere near as enthusiastic about automation as Silicon Valley. If automation becomes a key issue in the 2028 presidential race, much of Trump’s executive actions could be reversed in January 2028, depending on who’s in the Oval Office.
For Big Tech, the best-case scenario would be Vice President JD Vance, who is bullish on AI and against regulations that he says slow innovation. Their worst nightmare could be Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has been harshly critical of large firms pushing transformative technologies. Sitting on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Ocasio-Cortez recently said Congress’s lack of action to regulate AI amounts to corruption.
“AI giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have poured millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s privately funded White House ballroom,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez has floated a robot tax to offset disruption caused by automation, an idea that Sanders just revived on his press run pushing for AI regulation. Bill Gates proposed an eventual robot tax in 2017 back when the idea of robots taking over was more abstract. Though he’s probably more open to regulation than other tech figures, Gates is unlikely to become vocal about it. Republicans and business groups generally oppose the idea, calling it impractical to define what qualifies as a robot.
But China!
One of the main drivers for the US’s aggressive AI and robotics push is China’s rapidly advancing capabilities. The Chinese government has poured massive investments into industrial automation over the past decade, building the world’s largest manufacturing base and deploying robots in its factories at a scale unmatched by any other nation. By 2024, the People’s Republic had installed four times more industrial robots than the US.
The China competition argument still resonates with policy makers and defense officials but it’s losing persuasive power with the general public. Though Americans overwhelmingly hold negative views of China, opinions are softening, with the portion who consider the republic an enemy of the US dropping from 42 percent to 33 percent since 2024. According to a recent Chicago Council of Global Affairs study, 53 percent of Americans polled favored cooperating with China, up from 40 percent the prior year.
For most Americans, beating China is low on the list of priorities when they’re worried about their jobs, electricity bills, and keeping their children safe. The more AI and robotics are framed as threats to their livelihoods, the less the national-security argument feels like asking for sacrifice without consent.
Universal High Income
Optimists say rapid advancements in AI and robotics will ultimately improve the lives of everyone. Elon Musk has been especially bold in his predictions for the future that AI and humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus will unlock. During the 2025 Tesla shareholders meeting, he called Optimus “kind of like an infinite money glitch” that delivers near-limitless productivity.
“People often talk about eliminating poverty, giving everyone amazing medical care,” Musk said. “Well, there’s actually only one way to do that, and that’s with the Optimus robot.”
Though he’s said automation could have dystopian consequences, he says the more likely outcome is “universal high income” in a world where people only work if they choose. Musk’s rhetoric basically endorses the logic of universal basic income (UBI) without using the term. As the idea of UBI gains steam, Musk advances its underlying premise: that mass automation will require a guaranteed floor of economic certainty.
Messaging Shift
While Musk is speaking to a cult following, the larger robotics sector is increasingly leaning into a pragmatic view of the future of work. Leaders like NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang say AI and robotics augments workers rather than replacing them. While they acknowledge jobs will be eliminated, they say more will inevitably take their place just like every past industrial revolution.
“There’s a whole new industry of technicians and people who have to manufacture the robots,” Huang said recently on the Joe Rogan Podcast. “All the people who are building things for cars, supercharging charts, didn’t exist before cars and now we’re going to have robots.”
If the AI Bubble Pops
A lot of what happens next hinges on whether there’s an AI bubble similar to the 2000 dot-com crash. A growing chorus of analysts and investors question whether massive capital expenditures will ever result in real revenue and productivity gains.
A collapse could harden the perception that the public absorbed the risks while elites captured the upside. If superintelligence is inevitable, people tolerate disruption. If it’s speculative, the past few years start to look more reckless and wasteful. Skepticism would turn into downright hostility. Regulation would arrive as punishment rather than careful governance. Arguments how to manage AI would shift to who should be held accountable.
If there’s a crash, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where at least one tech leader doesn’t take the fall. It won’t be obvious where it’s headed until it’s actually happening. In any case, subscribe here to follow my agenda-free analysis as this unfolds.