It’s fundamentally about profit.” This is man vs machine. The People vs the Oligarchy. The 84-year-old socialist, face-to-screen with artificial intelligence, posts the result on YouTube.

Welcome to political theatre in 2026. Few progressives are as acutely attuned to how AI will remake politics as the stalwart from Vermont. Viral Iranian Lego-inspired propaganda, a mad king in the Oval Office, and the Sturm und Drang of a world at war – the politics of AI have been crowded out.

In recent months, Sanders has shifted his attacks from mere “oligarchs” to “AI oligarchs”. He is trying to impose a narrative on the tech at a moment when many politicians have looked on our age’s defining technology with incuriosity, bemusement, or dollar signs in their eyes. There are a few reasons for this negligence.

Caught between the AI hype-men trying to persuade investors to hand over billions and an inability to anticipate the future, debates about how to regulate AI in the US have been sparse considering the potential dangers. Upstream, cultural leftists have largely sneered at the technology because models sometimes say that “strawberry” contains the letter “p”. I suspect this has more to do with fear that the technology will take their jobs than an honest appraisal of how, say, AI has already changed the way the US wages war.

Let’s see how long that lasts. A new paper from Tufts University suggests that job losses will mostly hit progressives’ favourite cities: New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Boston. An NBC poll from March found that the only things more unpopular than AI were Iran and the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, anger towards the technology is rising among Gen Z. If working-class deindustrialisation led to today’s populism, and wokeness flowed from millennials despairing at the wrecked post-2008 job market, then what follows mass jobs losses for Gen Z and those same millennials? Worker obsolescence, not poverty, could be AI’s most radicalising effect, as it undermines a neurotic, elite-aspirant class, angry that their college degrees must compete with tradeable “tokens” of intelligence, generated at unbelievable, environmentally damaging speed inside data centres in northern Virginia.

Sanders also knows that our tech overlords are politically fertile targets to attack. They have – and regularly exercise – the power to publicly mock, belittle and upend the progressive upper-middle-class mores that were hegemonic before 2024. Trump is their avatar in the White House, the man who overrode Joe Biden-era tech regulation and the man whose former tech adviser’s catchphrase about AI companies was “let them cook”.

While those oligarchs in charge of AI companies like the president, they don’t seem to like the rest of us Homo sapiens very much. Peter Thiel once paused when asked whether he wanted the species to endure. Palantir, the company he co-founded, recently published a manifesto calling for conscription and mass surveillance to cut crime.

If I were to write a handbook for how to foment revolt, introducing the draft during an unpopular war would be my first bit of advice. Add to that higher electricity prices, Nimbyism and privacy concerns, and you’ve got a colourful anti-AI coalition. Then there is the growing awareness that AI is contingent on extraction.

Jeff Bezos’s new AI operation has a separate holding company to buy up firms disrupted by the very technology it is building, which will then feed on the data from its new purchases. It doesn’t take a political wizard to tell a story about how they plan to destroy the present in order to own the ruins. The backlash is already turning violent.

In recent weeks, Sam Altman’s house has been hit in two separate attacks, one involving a Molotov cocktail and the other a gun. The Molotov suspect once posted about “Luigi-ing some tech CEOs”. That’s a reference to Luigi Mangione, who is awaiting trial for a health insurance executive’s murder in Manhattan in 2024.

A murder, by the way, that was celebrated by Americans of all ages; their contempt for health insurance companies was greater than the value they put on a human life. That nihilism will find targets among the AI executives. This is the part where I remind readers about the uncertainty of AI’s potential impact.

Maybe the claims made for it by Altman, Elon Musk, the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and the rest are too large and too strange ever to be realised. Maybe life will go on, just with misfiring AI agents making some tasks slightly more efficient. Perhaps the sceptics are right.

But in political terms, the anger is already here. Sanders intuits the stakes. Once the attention black hole that is Donald Tru