Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders (born 1941) is the independent senior U.S. senator from Vermont, a two-time runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the most prominent democratic socialist in American politics. As ranking member of the Senate labor committee, he has spent the AI boom translating the technology into the vocabulary that defines his career: billionaires, workers, and who gets the surplus.

The oligarchs’ technology

On October 6, 2025, Sanders released a report titled The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers, warning that AI and automation could eliminate up to 97 million American jobs within a decade — including, by its estimates, 89% of fast-food jobs and nearly half of trucking jobs. He argues the danger is not the technology itself but its ownership, and he has said plainly that technology can and should improve the lives of working people. His signature prescription: if AI makes workers dramatically more productive, the reward should be a 32-hour work week at no loss of pay, along with worker seats on corporate boards and taxes on automation windfalls.

Sanders has also voiced sympathy for warnings about superintelligence from inside the industry, telling interviewers that the doomsday scenarios worry even the technologists building the systems. Economists dispute his job-loss numbers as an upper bound rather than a forecast, and critics note that past automation panics overshot; his rejoinder is that even a fraction of 97 million is a social emergency without precedent.