It’s easy to feel like Team Machine is winning. Big Tech companies are putting out increasingly powerful AI models and amassing billions of dollars in investments. (TIME has a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME’s archives.) The companies are being cheered on by the Trump Administration, which sees AI as key to geopolitical dominance.
Tech leaders, of course, say that they are on Team Human: that society’s productivity, happiness, and even health will be improved by ultrasmart, benevolent digital assistants. But many people don’t believe them—especially as some of these companies embrace tactics to juice revenue and usership, like erotica, deepfake generation, and in-chatbot ads. So AI’s critics are taking matters into their own hands. In the hopes of slowing the runaway hype train, they are staging rallies and packing town halls, delivering sermons, writing contract protections, filing lawsuits, and running for office. As physical manifestations of the industry’s heedlessness, the data centers powering AI systems have become the focus of protests. From Virginia to Indiana to Arizona, activists stalled $98 billion in data-center projects in the second quarter of 2025 alone, researchers at Data Center Watch found. “Every day I hear from someone with a different reason for fighting a data center,” says Saul Levin, a D.C.-based organizer.
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