Populist-conservative broadcaster and political strategist, and one of the figures named in reporting on the defeat of federal AI preemption.
Role in the preemption fight
Woolf's Transformer reporting credits Bannon with ending the last compromise attempt: he "killed Ted Cruz's last-minute compromise — a 5-year moratorium with limited exemptions — by phoning Marsha Blackburn's office," arguing "You just can't let these tech bros not have any regulations for a decade. It doesn't work."
The framing in that quotation is the analytically interesting part: the objection is to the industry's political position rather than to any specific AI risk, which is what allowed the populist-right objection to converge with labour-union and child-safety objections on the same vote. The reporting places Bannon opposite Musk, Andreessen, and Thiel in a split it describes as running through the Trump coalition itself.
Relationships
- related: How MAGA learned to love AI safety — Nicky Woolf (Transformer, October 2025) — the canonical citation for this position
- related: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sen. Josh Hawley, State-Level AI Regulation, AI Industry Discourse Analysis