Inside Democrats’ 2028 Brainstorm On Ai Safety

Four potential Democratic presidential candidates — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Rep. Ro Khanna — met over the weekend in San Francisco with AI safety advocates and Democratic Party veterans, according to exclusive details obtained by Decoded by POLITICO.

The two-day event held just days after the midterm elections underscores how 2028 hopefuls are viewing AI as a crucial part of their potential presidential bids after voter discontent over issues like AI data centers played a role in Democrats’ sweeping wins last week.

The event, hosted by Who Decides — an AI safety advocacy organization run by New York Assemblymember Alex Bores and his former legislative aide Anna Myers — also cemented the organization as an early Democratic power player in the AI and politics fight. Bores has become a key voice on AI safety since authoring a landmark law in the state and losing a congressional primary amid intense opposition spending from the industry.

Other attendees included Liz Shuler, who as AFL-CIO president leads the largest labor coalition in the country, as well as Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and Congressional Black Caucus Executive Director Vince Evans.

The meeting featured one-on-one interviews and group discussions of what the party should actually do about AI, according to three people with direct knowledge of the event, granted anonymity to candidly discuss private conversations. The people said reports from AI safety researchers scared many of the more traditional Democrats in attendance.

“I am terrified,” South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Christale Spain said at the beginning of a panel on early 2028 primary states, according to their accounts of the event. She ended the discussion joking about her fears, saying to the audience, “if you’re having another AI safety convening, do not invite me.”

One attendee called the event an “interspecies mixing” between Democratic partisans and Silicon Valley-based AI researchers. It began on Friday with a 110-person dinner at Greens, a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, in order to accommodate the dietary restrictions of many AI safety advocates. That elicited some “friendly grumbling” from the Democratic ecosystem, according to the attendee.

On Saturday, 150 people filled the Four Seasons on Market Street. Breakout sessions included discussions between Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson and Emanuel; Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union President Stu Appelbaum and Booker; American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Khanna; as well as between Bores and Pritzker.

“I think the AI safety risk is an existential risk,” Khanna told attendees. He also noted tech leaders frequently use language that makes the issue more abstract to voters. “The tech folks … use these fancy words — self-improving AI, air gap, sandbox — jargon, like the priests reading the Bible. And then members of Congress are like: ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to be called a Luddite.’ And the American people sense it.”

Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the weekend, according to insiders, came as Myers spoke with a senior leader at an AI safety research organization, who told the assembled audience that “it might be too late” to stop catastrophic harms from AI development. That elicited gasps within the room; the senior AI safety leader later clarified to say, “we might have one year or two years. If we aren’t too late, we don’t have long enough to count on unified government, so we probably need bipartisan cooperation here.”

Myers, who organized and introduced the event, used to work in tech, as did Bores.

“Our opposition moves in lockstep. We can’t afford to spend the afternoon telling each other what isn't possible,” she said in her opening statement Saturday. “This conversation needs people from every walk of life. The good news? Look around. They're here.”

Collaboration between AI safety advocates and politicians has frequently been chaotic — and further cooperation is not assured. But according to the same attendee, the potential candidates came “prepped on what these types of donors look for.”

“For Congress to do nothing is inviting exponentially more harm than the last wave of technology did. And so this is a moral moment where our history should ring in our ears,” Booker said during his fireside chat. “I call for a special session of Congress — an issue that has this big of a consequence to national security, and has some obvious things that we should be doing [that are] popular on both sides of the aisle.”

Emanuel told attendees that their worries — and the concerns of the public — were well reasoned.

“I can’t tell people not to panic,” he said. “They want their government and those in control and industry to take accountability.”

Aaron Mak contributed to this report.

A version of this story first appeared in Decoded by POLITICO, the must-read briefing on the people, power moves, policy battles and market shifts defining what’s next in global technology. Sign up to subscribe to the newsletter and listen to the podcast.