Anthropic's regulatory exposure is widening as the midterm elections approach, with candidates in both parties campaigning against the data centers that underpin AI development. The company's IPO paperwork acknowledges the risk, and the political environment is expected to become more hostile before it improves. Republicans currently control Congress and have not moved to constrain AI companies, either the technology they produce or the resources they consume. But voters in both parties largely oppose data centers and worry about AI displacing jobs, and the executive branch has already shown a willingness to create difficulty for Anthropic.
Data centers have become a central theme of the midterms. CNN found that as of this August, Democratic and Republican candidates had spent more than $35 million on campaign ads opposing data centers, and nearly 8 percent of video ads mentioned data centers, up from 1 percent a year earlier. In Ohio, NBC News rates the Senate race a toss up, and the candidates' positions on data centers could decide it. An August memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that Senator Jon Husted could lose his seat over his record on data centers, according to the source article.
Husted's Democratic opponent, Sherrod Brown, has built his platform around opposing data centers. Brown told supporters at a recent rally that the facilities consume land and water and drive up electricity prices once built, and he has called Husted the face of data centers and the reason the state has more than 200 of them. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce found in 2025 that the state granted $2.5 billion in tax breaks for the facilities from 2017 to 2024, a period when Husted was lieutenant governor. New York Times polling found voters favored Brown over Husted on managing data center development by 11 percentage points.
The partisan split is less clear elsewhere. In New Jersey, Adam Hamawy and Watson Coleman have both advocated slowing data center expansion in a state with at least 80 facilities. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro and opponent Stacy Garrity have each accused the other of flip-flopping, while Democrats broadly back policies making data centers harder and more expensive to build. In Texas, Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa have vowed to repeal a 2015 bill signed by Governor Greg Abbott that gave hyperscale data centers 20 years of tax breaks. Talarico also proposes requiring closed-loop cooling at new facilities and letting local communities reject data center projects. Polling shows him narrowly ahead of Republican Ken Paxton, whom Elon Musk has spent more than $276 million to aid; a Talarico win would make him the first Democrat to represent Texas in the Senate since 1993.
Some candidates want stricter rules for AI companies themselves. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed's "AI Under Control" proposal calls for a pause on AI model training and a Cabinet-level agency to inspect AI labs, along with restrictions on data center buildouts. Sitting Democrats are also acting: Oregon's Ron Wyden has proposed stripping tax breaks from the facilities, and Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have backed legislation to pause AI model development.
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