Bannon and Greene could not be reached for questions on the issue, including whether they’d try to mobilize voters against pro-AI legislation.

Wynton Hall, social media director at Breitbart, the right-populist site whose tech coverage has gone heavy on critiques of AI, said in an interview that he sees a brewing concern in the MAGA base over AI’s impact on humanity.

“There is within the conservative movement certainly a concern about child safety, mental health, all those things,” he said. He also sees AI-related job loss as a growing political issue on the right.

“The transhumanism stuff is also a real concern for conservatives,” he added.

Though that concept might seem obscure, it has already come up in Capitol Hill debates. In a June hearing of the House Oversight Committee, Republicans Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Anna Luna (R-Fla.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) all pushed back strongly against the notion of AI supplanting humans.

“AI lacks a few things — one being a soul, and also empathy. And we are not gods or God,” said Luna. She raised concerns about whether AI-driven technologies would ultimately prioritize human safety, or work against it.

“The Republican base is just not where the tech accelerationists are,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist who now leads the Alliance for Secure AI, a bipartisan nonprofit trying to push a middle-ground approach to AI guardrails.

An early organizer in the Tea Party movement circa 2008, Steinhauser thinks there will be a political backlash soon from parents and family members over the technology’s impact on the psyche, as well as morally concerning trends like creating lifelike revivals of dead people, or increasingly human-like AI companions.

His concerns are echoed by Beall, who wrote a widely circulated July essay published just before the Trump AI Action Plan titled, “A Conservative Approach to AGI.” (“AGI” refers to artificial general intelligence, or super-powerful AIs.) He argues that the industry’s race to develop superintelligent systems is a reckless attempt to build “self-creating gods” that flouts any coherent theology of man’s limitations.