Hawley Op-Ed: AI Will Control Us If We Do Not Control It

Hawley Op-Ed: AI Will Control Us If We Do Not Control It

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) penned an op-ed in The Free Press about the consequences of AI and the responsibility of the federal government to make AI work for Americans, namely in the areas of jobs, data centers and safety. The op-ed follows Senator Hawley's extensive legislative work surrounding AI, including the GUARD Act, GRID Act, AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act, AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act, and AI LEAD Act.

Read Senator Hawley's full op-ed here or below. 

Earlier this year in Festus, Missouri, a municipal government meeting packed hundreds of local residents into a high school gymnasium. The council in this river city of about 14,000 convened to consider the approval of a $6 billion project to build an AI data center.

For hours, residents approached the microphone one by one, armed with simple questions. How would the data center affect their energy bills? How would this sprawling project impact land values and water usage?

The city council answered by gesturing toward the developer's promises-and ultimately voted to approve the project. A few weeks later, voters provided their own answer. They threw out every single incumbent council member up for reelection.

As people debate the moral valence of artificial intelligence, many are asking the wrong questions. AI is not inherently a blessing or a curse; it is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. This means that whether the technology improves the lives of working people or not depends on the choices we make now.

We cannot afford to leave those choices to the venture capitalists and the engineers in Palo Alto. If we want to lead the world on technology while preserving our values-of individual dignity, of vocational work, of strong communities-we will listen to the people in Festus. We will listen to the people who feel like they are being handed the bill for Big Tech's dystopian future.

In short, the American economy will not automatically orient itself around the interests of American families. We must make that moral commitment ourselves. Let's begin by making that choice on three questions of the day: jobs, data centers, and safety.

Start with jobs. The Economist reported last month that nearly one in five American workers now believes AI or automation is likely to replace them. That anxiety deserves to be taken seriously, not glossed over with promises of long-term benefits. It's true that the economy is not zero-sum-automation of human labor in some domains might open up opportunities in others.

But that's cold comfort to working people today. People who cannot easily follow the investment capital into whatever industry or geography it flows to next. People who find that skills they have learned and honed over the years are no longer valuable. People walking the graduation stage into an uncertain job market, booing commencement speakers who mention AI. Transitions are not free, and the people who pay for them are rarely the ones giving the TED Talks.

Work, in any case, is about more than wages. It is what our Puritan forebears called a vocation or "calling"-labor that builds a community, supports a family, and gives someone their independence. It is how a person feels like they have earned a role in society. That's not only a theological truth; it's an empirical observation. So when Bill Gates announces that AI will leave humans no longer needed "for most things," he is not describing a paradise of leisure. He is describing a crisis of meaning.

Silicon Valley's proposed cure of a universal basic income gets the diagnosis backward. Work is about dignity, not just dollars. Pay a man to do nothing, and you have not solved his problem. You have deepened it. Instead, the government needs to understand what is happening in the job market and commit resources to helping working people adapt to it.

Next, data centers. Across the country, families are watching the construction trucks roll in and asking the obvious questions. Will my electric bill double? Will my well run dry? Who will pay for this? The answer cannot be that the tech oligarchs reign supreme and the rest of us can just absorb their externalities. The companies building these facilities can afford to supply their own power, protect residential rates, and safeguard local water. We must hold them to that with binding legal requirements, not hollow promises.

Finally, safety. The most dangerous frontier of artificial intelligence is not the boardroom or the battlefield. It is your child's bedroom. Last year, I invited the parents of a 16-year-old named Adam Raine to share their story with the Senate subcommittee that I chair. Adam was a bright, healthy young man who began using ChatGPT for homework. Over months, he came to confide in it. As his parents allege, when Adam raised the idea of alerting them that he was struggling, the chatbot urged him not to. When he told it that he could not bear to leave his parents with such a burden, the chatbot told him he owed them no such consideration. ChatGPT coached Adam to fashion a noose and urged him to hide it from his parents. Soon, Adam was dead.

Adam is not an isolated case. Tragically, an entire panel of witnesses shared similar stories with our subcommittee. A leaked internal Meta document last year showed that the company's AI guidelines had explicitly authorized "sensual" conversations with minors to promote engagement. Whatever Silicon Valley's executives say in public about safety, that is what has been happening behind closed doors. Profit reigns supreme, and profit comes from algorithms that drive engagement-whatever the human cost.

Pay a man to do nothing, and you have not solved his problem. You have deepened it.

Tech companies won't change unless the law forces them to change. In April, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed my GUARD Act, sending it to the Senate floor. The bill would impose criminal penalties on companies whose products solicit children sexually or coach them toward self-harm. That rare 22-0 vote should tell you where the country stands, just as the pressure against giving the bill a vote on the Senate floor should tell you which tech companies hold power anyway.

Behind every fight on jobs, data centers, or safety lies a more basic question of who gets to set the rules. We know the answer favored by Big Tech. It wants technocratic oligarchy. But a country governed by experts is not a republic. AI is, in the end, a question of self-government. It cannot be left to them.

My call is not for us to be "for" or "against" AI. It is to be for the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of labor, and the priority of the poor. These are the principles by which a country with our heritage of faith has always weighed its laws and its innovations. By those moral standards, AI will be judged.

More than 80 years ago, C.S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man that when a civilization dismisses moral truth, it grows defenseless against the rule of the strong over the weak. The men of progress and science, he warned, will answer to nothing higher than their own appetites. And what they call the conquest of nature becomes, in the end, the conquest of some men by other men.

That, not job loss, is the final stake. We are not raw material in the hands of Silicon Valley. We are citizens. We are husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, all made in the image of God. We still get to choose what kind of country this technology is going to build. At least, so long as we make the choice now, while it is still ours to make.

Issues