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The ‘botlash’ movement is gaining momentum

Marietje Schaake The writer is a fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is the author of ‘The Tech Coup’

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The more power AI companies claim, the stronger a storm of popular sentiment against its deployment is swelling from all kinds of directions. Across the US, grassroots movements are forming to protest against various excesses and the effects of the technology, from parents furious about the harms done to children with chatbot companions to communities attempting to block data centres and objecting to company contracts with government agencies.

Tech chief executives and the Trump administration thus far calculate that embracing deregulation will ensure American AI dominance over geopolitical rivals. But they may well face a backlash, or “botlash”, reckoning at home.

In his recent essay ‘The Adolescence of Technology’, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI start-up Anthropic, invited readers to imagine AI as a country of geniuses. He wondered whether such a country would act benignly or malignly and conceded that he feared a future AIenabled authoritarianism.

Some in the US believe such a future is already here. In Minneapolis, protesters have drawn direct lines between the country’s biggest AI companies and the Trump administration’s anti-immigration enforcement. “QuitGPT” is a campaign urging users to abandon OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a form of civic protest against the support its founders have shown for President Donald Trump (co-founder Greg Brockman donated $25mn to the Super Pac Maga Inc). Street protests have also targeted the Palo Alto offices of Palantir, the data intelligence company that has contracts with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

As “Resist and Unsubscribe” gathers momentum as a form of a modernday strikes, it is notable that AI opposition spans the political spectrum. Democrat Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren warn against corporate power concentration and job displacement, while Maga strategist Steve Bannon and Republican Senator Josh Hawley spread warnings about the dangers of empowering tech billionaires. When the Maga right and the progressive left converge, something fundamental may be shifting.

The list of grievances being raised against AI is varied. At the local level, communities are fighting the construction of data centres that they worry will disrupt resources such as water, land and electricity. According to Data Center Watch, protests have resulted in at least 20 proposed facilities being halted in just three months last year.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, celebrities have launched the “Stealing Isn’t Innovation” campaign against the use of creative work for AI training, and parents, along with 37 state attorneysgeneral, are pressing for accountability after Grok, xAI’s chatbot, facilitated the generation of nonconsensual nude images of women and children.

Yet instead of doing what populists claim to be good at, listening to the people, Trump is doubling down. Former president Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety was one of the first items shredded after Trump took office in January 2025. Last December, he signed a new executive order that aims to block states from regulating AI, directing the Department of Justice to challenge rules and threatening to withhold federal funding from states that persist. More than 1,200 AI bills were introduced at the state level in 2025 alone. This is a clear sign that citizens and their representatives want greater protection, oversight and accountability.

The calculation on the part of tech executives appears to be that deregulation is a winning political bet. But trust in AI is lower in the US than it is in the EU, where regulation at least signals that someone is responsible for protecting the public interest.

For the moment, the protests are fragmented: environmental protesters, child safety campaigners, democracy advocates and labour activists are not speaking with one voice. Whoever manages to unite these groups by building a popular AI regulation movement will tap into new political power.

AI companies have spent years presenting tech products as too strategically important to regulate, and politicians as too technically incompetent to govern them. But if companies want to behave like states, surveilling people, curating information flows and restructuring labour markets, then citizens will seek to hold them accountable as states. If not with legislation, then with their wallets. The “botlash” is a potent political force.

The ‘bot­lash’ move­ment is gain­ing momentum

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