{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/", "NEWS: Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez\u00a0Announce\u00a0AI Data Center Moratorium Act", "2026-03-25", "2026", "2026-03", "Independent", "Senate", "VT", "Bernard Sanders", "S000033", "www.sanders.senate.gov", "sanders", "https://www.sanders.senate.gov/media/press-releases/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, March 25 \u2014 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) today announced the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Center Moratorium Act, legislation that would enact a reasonable pause to the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity.\n\n\u201cAI and robotics are creating the most sweeping technological revolution in the history of humanity. The scale, scope and speed of that change is unprecedented. Congress is way behind where it should be in understanding the nature of this revolution and its impacts,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cBottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity. We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue. The time for action is now. We need a federal moratorium on AI data centers.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe have seen ICE partner with AI companies to surveil Americans, social media users employ AI bots to create sexually explicit deepfakes of women and children, and data center construction inflate electric bills in communities across the country. And all of this harm has occurred because of the absence of federal legislation to regulate AI,\u201d Ocasio-Cortez said. \u201cCongress has a moral obligation to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.\u201d\n\nThe legislation would slow down the development of AI to give democracy a chance to catch up. The AI Data Center Moratorium Act of 2026 would do that by instituting an immediate federal moratorium on AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place to ensure that:\n\nAI is safe and effective \u2014 preventing executives in the AI industry from releasing harmful products into the world that threaten the health and well-being of working families, our privacy and civil rights and the future of humanity.\n\nThe economic gains of AI and robotics will benefit workers, not just the wealthy owners of Big Tech.\n\nAI does not increase electricity or utility prices, harm communities or destroy the environment.\n\nAdditionally, this bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.\n\nMore than 100 local communities around the country have enacted moratoriums on data centers and 12 states are pushing forward with statewide moratorium proposals.\n\nIn 2023, more than 1,000 industry leaders and scientists, including Elon Musk, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, called for AI labs to \u201cimmediately pause for at least 6 months\u201d and, if such a pause were not enacted, called on governments to \u201cstep in and institute a moratorium.\u201d In December, Elon Musk, who leads xAI, said he had \u201ca lot of AI nightmares\u201d and would \u201ccertainly slow down AI and robotics\u201d if he could. In January, Demis Hassabis, the head of Google\u2019s Deepmind, said he would support an AI pause if he knew other countries and companies also paused development. In February, Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, said he was \u201cabsolutely in favor of trying\u201d to slow down AI development if other countries also slowed down.\n\nRead a section-by-section summary here.", 1, "2026-04-04T05:28:40Z", "2026-04-04T05:30:10Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.6682281382381916, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}