A single Instagram post from the New York City Democratic Socialists of America has exposed a widening rift on the American left over artificial intelligence, one that pits the language of existential risk against the everyday harms of data centers, surveillance, and corporate power. The post, published on September 10, 2026, opened with an ouroboros, a dragon devouring its own tail, set against a hot pink background. Its caption read: "AI alarmism and AI hype are the same story: both keep your attention on a science-fiction future to distract you from the real harms experienced in the present."
The carousel, authored by the chapter's Tech Action Working Group, drew more than 25,000 likes on Instagram. The response was not uniformly friendly. "Horrible and dangerous take. Sometimes sounding the alarm is justified," one commenter wrote. The post landed two days after Jacob Coxon, a researcher who recently quit Anthropic, publicly warned that AI could end humanity. It landed one day after six candidates affiliated with the Working Families Party, including four backed by Bernie Sanders, released statements calling on Washington to regulate AI to prevent existential threats to humanity.
The collision of those two events made the fault line visible. On one side are figures like Sanders, the 85-year-old senator and unofficial leader of the American left, who has spent the past year bringing AI safety concerns from Bay Area circles into his populist orbit. On the other are socialists like the members of NYC DSA's Tech Action Working Group, who argue that the doom framing is a distraction from harms already underway. The group supports "comprehensive AI and tech regulation at the federal, state, and city level, addressing frontier model regulation while also fighting back against the ways that corporate AI is already being used."
Alan Deng, a member of the working group, put the case plainly. "AI has become the latest tool of capitalist exploitation. The damage that unregulated and misused AI is already causing is clear across the country," he said. "As socialists, we don't trust these corporations to craft their own regulations."
Sanders and the Safety Push
Sanders has been the most prominent left voice on AI safety. In March 2026, he released a data center moratorium bill that linked pausing construction with the need for federal regulation to protect "the future of humanity." He has called AI "the most transformational technology in the history of the world." His positioning has put him in unusual alliances, most notably with Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump and right-wing populist podcast host. Sanders was also early to opposing data centers, which became a major organizing pole for the left this year. His messaging appears to have inspired left-wing candidates to tie AI concerns to data center fights.
Not everyone on the left welcomes that framing. Timnit Gebru, the AI researcher and tech industry critic, accused Sanders and others of "taking their cues from literal doomsday eugenicist cults," a reference to the effective altruist and rationalist philosophies that underpin AI safety conversations in Silicon Valley. One NYC DSA member with a tech background, speaking privately, offered a blunter version of the same sentiment: "Some of us are looking at Bernie and saying, what happened?"
Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not on the exact same page on AI. Ocasio-Cortez cosponsored Sanders' data center moratorium legislation, including language about AI threatening humanity in her House version. But she has not participated in the high-profile AI safety discussions that Sanders has. Her language on AI focuses on data centers, job harms, and worries about the industry creating a bubble. Asked about AI safety last week, she said "two things can be true at once," noting AI "can be very dangerous when pursued without any guardrails," and warned "we could be seeing an economic bubble collide with a technological frontier."
The internal debate extends to the national organization. A convention resolution before the Democratic Socialists of America proposes organizational support for Sanders and Representative Greg Casar's bill to ban superintelligence altogether. NYC DSA is the largest DSA chapter in the country, and its Tech Action Working Group focuses on tech regulation issues for the chapter.
Chowdhury: Attention as a Business Model
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Chowdhury also pointed to the coming public offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which aim to go public in coming years. She said the attention and scrutiny could be a boon for them in the long run. "Part of IPOing is sharing a lot of diligence documentation on risks and how risks have been addressed," she said. "This way, they can say, there is a full regulatory regime that they are part of establishing in this industry to guard against the worst risks, and that we have all established exactly what the 'worst risks' are."
On the Ground in New York
Pragathi Barusubramanian, a member of the NYC DSA Tech Action working group and a leader in anti-data center organizing, said the existential risk conversation simply does not register in the communities she works with. "When it comes down to what's happening on the ground," she said, the conversation about existential risk "doesn't come up at all." Instead, "there's an understanding that AI and data center companies don't have our interests at heart." The working group helped New York pass a one-year moratorium on data centers earlier this year. Barusubramanian added that she is "happy that everyone is talking about AI now."
Alexander McCoy, a Democratic strategist who works on AI issues and advises several Congressional candidates, rejects the idea that the left is split. He helped found Irreplaceable, a left-leaning pro-AI safety organization, and he argues that the same people worried about frontier governance are also fighting present harms. "The same people concerned about frontier governance and the development of superintelligence are also addressing those current harms," McCoy said. "We should address all these other important factors. Those frontier AI abilities are true and increasing in power. They are not fake or hype."
McCoy pointed to several DSA members, including New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who have made recent statements about Coxon's warnings and the Hugging Face hack. He dismissed Gebru and similar critics as "marginal, unrepresentative, and also, frankly, picking an unnecessary distinction. It's yes and . We should address harms like surveillance and Flock cameras, and other important factors. These do not come in any way at the expense of governing frontier AI capabilities."
Phil Aroneanu, executive director of Irreplaceable, came to AI safety from climate activism. He sees a direct parallel between the two movements and believes both immediate and future harms can be addressed at once. He described "this very similar intersection between the direct impact of fossil fuel extraction, people's homes getting flooded out because of climate-change-fueled storms, and then the broader movement focusing on the longer-term issue of risks and emissions." Irreplaceable was founded by McCoy with an initial seed fund from the Center for AI Safety.
Voters May Not Care About the Split
Any ideological concerns within DSA may matter less than they seem once voters get a say. A Politico poll released Wednesday shows two in three Americans think there is at least some risk that AI could "destroy humanity." The ultimate question for the left is not whether to support AI regulation, but what regulations to put time and resources behind. The left broadly agrees on the need for regulation. It disagrees on what that regulation should look like and how concerned to be. The split centers on whether to believe tech companies' claims that their products could end the world.