AI is the Devil
The campaign against AI data centers increasingly looks less like a policy debate than a moral panic. Critics cast these facilities as threats to local power and water supplies while often ignoring that some AI companies are building power generation, paying for grid upgrades, and using water-recycling systems for cooling. The question is not whether AI carries risks; it is whether America can manage them without surrendering technological leadership.
Bill Gates has now joined the chorus of alarm. The looney billionaire philanthropist, climate-policy and lab grown meat advocate warned that AI is powerful enough to drive events that could cause a billion deaths. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Gates argued for stronger safeguards and monitoring inside AI labs.
“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths. So even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100 percent, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” Gates said. He added that safeguards should begin with “watching what the AI is doing” through monitoring systems inside AI labs.
He continued, “Law enforcement is going to get called up on all these fraud events or, you know, transmission shutdown events, and their ability to see what’s going on is going to be nil unless the monitoring and safeguards are built into the AI.”
What went largely untested was the strategic problem: America’s rivals, especially China, are not waiting for Washington to perfect an AI rulebook. Any serious safeguard regime must ask whether it would restrain U.S. innovators while leaving adversaries free to move faster.
Some monitoring is necessary, but caution cannot become paralysis. AI is both a risk and a strategic asset, and the choice is not between reckless deployment and federal control. The better course is disciplined innovation: enforce existing laws, demand accountability, and keep America ahead of adversaries that will not follow our rules.
That is why President Trump’s effort to convene AI executives around a “morally binding” compact should not be dismissed as weakness. A voluntary safety framework backed by existing enforcement can move faster than Congress while preserving American competitiveness. Mr. Trump is pursuing the more practical path.
“Every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public,” the AI compact says. Signatories agree to develop “robust” internal monitoring of models, use outside auditors to test them, and designate an independent board committee to oversee the internal safety team.
The voluntary pact also acknowledges the limits of government regulation, especially against open-weight Chinese models that do not answer to U.S. law. AI poses serious risks, including the possibility that bad actors use Chinese models for destructive purposes. The strongest defense is for U.S. models to advance quickly enough to detect and counter those threats.
Companies also have strong business incentives to pace and police themselves: they want to avoid lawsuits, enforcement actions, and reputational damage. “I have a guardrail. You know what the guardrail is? The Department of Justice,” President Trump said this week after he renamed AI “Super Intelligence”.
He is right that new laws are not required to punish wrongdoing or negligence. Companies know the government sword is hanging over them. To reinforce the point, Federal Trade Commission officials this week signaled a probe of frontier AI models.
Many Democrats nonetheless want Washington to exert far more control over AI infrastructure. That is the real significance of Senate Democrats blocking the Ratepayer Protection Act, which the House passed last month on an overwhelming bipartisan 417-3 vote.
The bill would require state public utility commissions to consider a federal standard directing large data centers to pay the incremental grid-infrastructure costs needed to serve them. The legislation is unnecessary because many states are already moving in this direction, and some AI companies are building power generation or paying for grid upgrades to connect data centers.
Yet Senate Minority Leader Charles “Chuck U” Schumer objected because the bill is not binding. “Senate Democrats want to make it mandatory for data centers to cover their own costs, by law, not by suggestion or hope or whim,” he said. He also called the bill “optional,” “toothless,” and “a fraud.” His objection shows the larger fight: whether AI infrastructure will be governed through targeted cost rules or slowed through broad federal control.
The AI Data Center Moratorium Act from Senator Bernie Sanders and his acolyte Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes that impulse explicit by pausing new AI data-center construction and expansion until Washington establishes national safeguards on environmental harms, utility prices, working families, privacy, civil rights, and job displacement.
The legislation reflects a growing Democratic appetite for federal control over AI infrastructure. America should reject both complacency and panic: AI requires accountability, but the country cannot regulate itself into second place.
AI is not the Devil.