U.S. lawmakers label Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others as "oligarchs" of artificial intelligence

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday stepped up his criticism of the AI boom, warning in the Senate that the so-called “big tech oligarchs” want an AI revolution that will only make a few billionaires richer—not benefit the broader working class.

The independent senator from Vermont, on the X website, wrote: “Who is pushing for AI? Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison. What they want isn’t what working families truly need.” He also embedded the full text of his remarks in Congress.

In the course of this speech, Sanders repeatedly named Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison, calling them the main drivers of current advances in AI and robotics. He said these people are investing “hundreds of billions of dollars” not to solve economic hardship, but to expand their own wealth and power.

He pointed out that Musk has warned that AI and robots could replace all jobs, and cited reports that Bezos wants to raise $100 billion to achieve factory automation. He also mentioned Ellison’s vision for continuous AI monitoring, saying Congress failed to confront the consequences.

The day before, Sanders directly attacked the Amazon founder for Bezos seeking $100 billion in funding to replace workers with robots globally. At the time, Sanders wrote: “The oligarchs want everything. This won’t happen. Stand up and fight back!”

Sanders tied this rhetoric to a range of policy agendas. In a minority staff report for the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee made public in October 2025, he backed a 32-hour workweek without pay cuts, called for a ban on stock buybacks, and said the benefits brought by AI should go to employees rather than executives and shareholders.

In addition, he urged a pause on building new AI data centers, warning that these facilities would threaten jobs, democracy, and public resources, while also pushing for broader measures to tax the wealthy to curb billionaires’ power.

Other parts of the Tuesday speech further expanded on this argument. Sanders said AI could replace nearly 100 million U.S. jobs within a decade, intensify the spread of politically driven misinformation fueled by deepfake technology, worsen children’s mental health, and put enormous strain on the power grid through massive data centers. In the worst case, if superintelligent systems were to get out of human control, they could even pose an existential threat. He suggested that whether the U.S. Congress will take action is the real test.

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