Tech investment drove more than a third of US Q2 2026 growth
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont shared a stage at a Washington “pro-human” conference on Tuesday, both criticizing the lack of congressional action on AI regulation. Bannon warned that the administration was not being given unlimited authority over the technology’s development. “We think this could be a great technology, but we’re not going to give these guys a carte blanche,” Bannon told attendees. “There’s been no debate.”
Just before Bannon spoke, Sanders, identified by the BBC as a democratic socialist, accused Washington policymakers of failing to address the “potentially catastrophic consequence” of unregulated AI. “Congress under both Democratic and Republican control has been asleep at the wheel,” Sanders said. “And now we have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing.”
According to a recent report by the forecasting firm ING, tech investment accounted for more than a third of all US economic expansion in the second quarter of 2026. The BBC reported that Trump regularly touts America as the “hottest” country in the world, and that many economists indicate investment in AI technology — including infrastructure and equipment — has been the driving force in the US economy for several years. Much of the rise in corporate valuations — and, by extension, the value of many Americans’ retirement portfolios — has been attributed to massive spending on computer chips, data centers, and other AI infrastructure. Anything that threatens this growth, which Trump considers to be a hallmark of his presidency and a key to his political legacy, quickly draws his suspicion, according to the BBC.
The conference came days after President Donald Trump issued a series of social media posts on Monday dismissing concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence — concerns that “robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all” — as a “hoax,” language the BBC noted Trump typically reserves for theories of human-driven climate change, investigations into Russian election-meddling, and the drives to impeach and remove him from office during his first presidential term. In the posts, Trump styled himself as the “hoax buster” and issued a full-throated endorsement of what he called “the greatest economic development engine in history,” scorned those who doubted the benefits of the technology, and wrote that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades.” Trump added, “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies.”
According to the BBC, none of that has deterred Trump, whose social media fusillade was his latest effort to turn back growing AI scepticism through sheer force of will. The BBC reported that Trump views what is needed not as debate or new policies but trust in his authority and judgement — a desire for centralized presidential authority the BBC characterized as a familiar theme of his second term in office, similar to his outlook on immigration and trade, where he believes he should have the sole power to decide who can enter and remain in the country, and when and where to impose tariffs. By fully joining the AI fight, the BBC reported, Trump has elevated the issue to the forefront of American politics, even at the risk of crossing longtime allies.
Unlike tariffs and immigration, which have been issues of interest for Trump for decades, the rise in artificial intelligence technology is a recent development for the president, the BBC reported. Trump has framed AI expansion as a large-scale industrial competition between the world’s two largest economies, the US and China. In the BBC’s framing as a zero-sum contest for global power, a Chinese lead means an American lag. Trump said on Saturday, “We’re leading China in AI, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.”
The BBC reported that Trump often touts a conservative view that his opponents on the left are against the free market and economic liberties and rely on alarmism to justify greater government intervention and control. Yet Trump — who touts partial US ownership of US Steel and the semiconductor manufacturer Intel, and has no qualms about picking winners and losers in the American economy — is hardly a traditional small-government conservative, according to the BBC.
Trump’s close ties to prominent tech executives from the start of his second term may help explain his AI evangelism. Tech entrepreneur David Sacks, a co-chair of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and his informal AI tsar, has been a longtime supporter whose publicly aired scepticism of AI regulation mirrors recent comments made by the president, the BBC reported. Sacks told CBS News over the weekend that AI safety concerns are being amplified for political reasons. “I think this is becoming a panic,” Sacks said. “We’re in an election season, and there is an incentive for political actors to try and amplify the fear.”
Elon Musk, despite a rocky relationship with Trump, has shaped the direction of the administration, the BBC reported. Among those with prominent seats at Trump’s inauguration were Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and former Apple chief executive Tim Cook. These executives, along with Anthropic head Dario Amodei, hold a range of views on the necessity of greater AI regulation and have differing levels of access to, and influence on, the president. In Amodei’s case, his conflicts with the Pentagon over the unrestricted use of Anthropic’s AI models could have negatively affected Trump’s reception of arguments for slowing AI development, the BBC reported.
In Congress, prospects for new legislation on AI guardrails appeared stalled on Tuesday. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared to back away from earlier openness to congressional action and instead echoed Trump’s “AI hoax” rhetoric. With midterm congressional elections looming, candidates from both parties are wary of ending up on the wrong side of public opinion, which polls show is skeptical of the promised benefits of AI. Republicans are also wary of crossing Trump on an issue that has become a political touchstone for the president.
The ranks of AI doubters have been growing in recent weeks, the BBC reported, amid anxiety over the disruptive nature of the technology — if not worries about potentially civilisation-threatening danger — among some industry insiders and politicians, including from within Trump’s own Republican Party. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said the public is “right to be afraid” of AI but should trust the companies building it.
Matt Calkins, chief executive of the software firm Appian, said the industry has long expected the AI debate to enter politics. “This is the most prominent debate in the entire industry and has been since the beginning,” Calkins said. “We knew it would spill into politics at some point because it had to.” The issue has not yet become politically decisive, Calkins added, but could shift quickly. “It is possible that events in the future might electrify the public,” Calkins said, “and then positions — and talk — might not be so cheap.”