Anthropic filed paperwork to go public on Monday, and its list of business risks ranges from the far-fetched to the everyday. Among them, one stands out as the most likely source of trouble: the "evolving and uncertain regulatory and political environment." With an IPO expected around mid-November, the company has only a few months before the political pressure is likely to grow.
The current Republican-controlled Congress has not moved to constrain AI companies, either the technology they build or the resources they consume. Voters, though, are another matter. Americans of both parties largely oppose data centers and worry about AI taking jobs. The executive branch has already shown a willingness to make things difficult for Anthropic. If the midterms produce the Democratic wave that many predict, the company could find itself on the wrong side of the legislative branch as well.
Data centers have become a campaign issue. As of August, CNN found that Democratic and Republican candidates had spent more than $35 million on campaign ads opposing them. Nearly 8 percent of video ads mentioned data centers, up from 1 percent a year earlier.
Nowhere is the fight sharper than in Ohio. NBC News rates the Senate race there as a toss-up, and the candidates' positions on data centers could decide it. In a private memo from August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that Sen. Jon Husted could lose his seat because of his record on the issue. "More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted's neck," the memo said. "If he loses and datacenters get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one." The Ohio Chamber of Commerce found in 2025 that the state gave $2.5 billion in tax breaks for the facilities from 2017 to 2024, a stretch when Husted was lieutenant governor.
His Democratic challenger, Sherrod Brown, has made opposition to data centers central to his campaign. "They eat up our land. They swallow up our water... then once they're built, our electricity prices go up," Brown told supporters at a recent rally. He has called Husted "the face of data centers" and blamed him for the more than 200 facilities across the state. Recent New York Times polling found that voters believed by 11 percentage points that Brown would do a better job than Husted managing data center development.
Other races don't break down so neatly along party lines. In New Jersey, Democratic hopefuls Adam Hamawy and Watson Coleman have both called for slowing the expansion of data centers, of which there are at least 80 in the state. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro and his opponent, Stacy Garrity, have each accused the other of flip-flopping on the issue. Still, Democrats there have broadly backed policies that would make it harder and more expensive to build data centers.
Texas may be the clearest test. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa have both vowed to work toward repealing a 2015 bill, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, that gives hyperscale data centers 20 years of tax breaks. Talarico's platform also calls for requiring new facilities to use closed-loop cooling systems and for giving local communities the power to reject data center projects. Recent polling shows Talarico with a narrow lead, even though Elon Musk has spent more than $276 million to aid Republican Ken Paxton. If Talarico wins, he would become the first Democrat to represent Texas in the Senate since 1993.
Candidates in other battleground states are pushing for tougher rules on AI companies. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed's "AI Under Control" proposal calls for a pause on AI model training and a Cabinet-level agency to inspect AI labs. He has also backed restrictions on data center buildouts.
Officeholders are moving too. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed stripping tax breaks from data centers. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have backed legislation to pause the development of AI models themselves. With the public broadly behind reining in the industry, the analysis argues that Anthropic may have timed its IPO well, buying a few months before the political environment turns more hostile and public opinion against AI hardens further.
Este artigo foi escrito com a assistência de IA.
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