Steve Bannon at CPAC 2023 on March 3, 2023 (Lev Radin/Shutterstock.com)
Steve Bannon — who was President Donald Trump's chief White House strategist in 2017 — is now railing against one of the president's top policy priorities.
ABC News reported Monday that Bannon took time on his podcast to harshly criticize the administration's pledge to pour billions of dollars into powering artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in the United States. Bannon called AI "the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind" and warned Trump's promise to accelerate it would have disastrous effects on workers.
ABC reporter Will Steakin quoted Bannon as saying AI had the potential to "crush the working class" and that Trump doubling down on it would result in major losses for Republicans in both the 2026 midterm election and the 2028 presidential election.
"I'm a capitalist," Bannon said of AI during a podcast episode last week. "This is not capitalism. This is corporatism and crony capitalism."
Bannon — who remains a steadfast Trump supporter and hinted in October that there were already plans underway to keep him in office for a third term – insisted to ABC that he felt motivated to speak out against the proliferation of unregulated AI as a means of ensuring the MAGA movement would have a positive legacy.
"History will know us for this," Bannon said. "Even more than the age of Trump, [the MAGA base] will be known for this. So we've got to get it right."
Bannon isn't the only influential figure within MAGA to break with Trump over AI regulation. ABC cited far-right influencer Matt Walsh, who said during a Daily Wire podcast that AI was "probably the greatest crisis we face as a species right now" and that Americans were "sleepwalking into our dystopian future." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who announced her retirement from Congress last week, has also severely criticized AI as a threat to local resources, given that AI data centers require large amounts of water to cool servers and have been associated with higher utility costs for local residents in communities with data centers.
Click here to read ABC's full report.