Anthropic filed paperwork to go public on Monday, and while its list of business risk factors spans the fanciful (sentient AI) and the mundane (losing its executives), one stands above the rest as a likely source of headaches in the near future: the “evolving and uncertain regulatory and political environment.” With an expected IPO around mid-November, and new representatives from the midterms elections to be sworn in in January, the company has a scant few months before it’s almost guaranteed to incur even more political headaches.
While the current Republican-controlled Congress has not put its political will behind constraining AI companies — either the technology they produce or the resources they consume — Americans of both parties are largely agreed in their opposition to data centers and concern about AI displacing jobs. With the executive branch already willing to create difficulty for Anthropic, the predicted “blue wave” of the midterms may result in the company landing on the wrong side of the legislative branch too.
Anti-data center sentiment has absolutely been a factor in the midterms. As of this August, CNN found both Democratic and Republican candidates had spent more than $35 million on campaign ads opposing data centers, with nearly 8 percent of video ads, up from 1 percent a year earlier mentioning data centers.
NBC News currently ranks Ohio’s senate race as a toss up, and the candidates’ stance on data centers could be the deciding factor in the election. In a private memo from August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned Senator Jon Husted of Ohio could lose his seat entirely due to his track record on data centers. “More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the memo read. “If he loses and datacenters get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.” In 2025, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce found that the state gave $2.5 billion in tax breaks for the facilities from 2017 to 2024, a period during which Husted was lieutenant governor.
Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown meanwhile has made opposing data centers the center of his platform. “They eat up our land. They swallow up our water … then once they’re built, our electricity prices go up,” Brown told supporters at a recent rally. He has labelled Husted “the face of data centers,” calling him the “reason” there are more than 200 data centers across the state. Recent polling from The New York Times found voters believed by an 11 percentage-point margin that Brown would do a better job than Husted would managing the development of data centers.
In other Senate, House and gubernatorial races, the divide on data centers between Democrats and Republicans hasn’t been so clear cut. New Jersey’s respective hopefuls, Adam Hamawy and Watson Coleman, have both advocated to slow the expansion of data centers, of which there are at least 80 in the state. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro and his opponent Stacy Garrity have accused each other of flip-flopping on the issue, but broadly Democrats have advocated for policies that would make it more difficult and expensive for companies to build data centers.
In Texas, both Democratic Senate and gubernatorial hopefuls James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa have vowed to work toward repealing a bill Governor Greg Abbott signed in 2015 giving hyperscale data centers 20 years of tax breaks. Talarico’s platform also calls legislation that would require new facilities to use closed-loop cooling systems, and give local communities the authority to reject data center developments in their municipality. Recent polling shows Talarico with a narrow lead on his opponent, despite Elon Musk spending more than $276 million to aid Republican Ken Paxton. If Talarico wins, he would become the first Democrat to represent Texas in the Senate since 1993.
Candidates in other battleground states have called for even more stringent regulation of AI companies. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed’s “AI Under Control” proposal calls for a pause on AI model training and the creation of a Cabinet-level government agency that would inspect AI labs. Like his cohorts, El-Sayed has also advocated for restrictions on data center buildouts.
Current-term Democrats are already getting their shot against the highly unpopular AI industry and its constituent data centers lined up. Oregon’s Ron Wyden has proposed plans to strip tax breaks from these facilities; Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, have backed legislation to pause the development of AI models themselves. With the public broadly behind the issue of reining in this industry and a voter mandate in the form of a blue wave, Anthropic might have smartly timed its IPO to buy a few months reprieve before the political environment becomes more hostile and public sentiment turns even more sharply against AI.
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