Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg (born 1982) is the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, and served as U.S. Secretary of Transportation from 2021 to 2025 — a role that put him in charge of regulating one of AI’s first physical frontiers, autonomous vehicles.

The underreaction essay

In June 2025, Buttigieg published “We Are Still Underreacting on AI” on his Substack, arguing that American society — and his own Democratic Party in particular — had failed to grasp the scale of what was coming. The essay predicted the changes would play out “not over the course of generations but rather in less time than it takes an American student to complete high school,” and pressed questions about “wealth and poverty, work and unemployment, citizenship and power, isolation and belonging.”

Notably, the essay is not a case against the technology. Buttigieg wrote that AI is here to stay regardless of anyone’s preferences, and that “what matters is how people use it, what it does for us and to us, whom it is used to help or to hurt, and who gets to decide.” His prescription is preparation: policy for labor disruption, guardrails against concentrated power, and a politics that treats AI as the defining issue it is. The essay circulated widely in Washington as a marker that AI had arrived as a 2028 campaign theme.