AI Billionaires Are Getting Scared. Workers Are Tearing Down Data Centers and Ripping Surveillance Cameras Off Poles, and Suddenly Bezos and Musk Want to Help the Working Class

For years the pitch was that AI would automate the world and workers should get ready. The tune is changing now that crowds are shutting down data centers, cities are tearing out AI surveillance cameras, and the backlash is showing up in the numbers.

In Q1 2026 alone, local opposition blocked or delayed more than $130 billion in data center projects. Cancellations have quadrupled, dozens of communities have passed moratoria, and a March 2026 Gallup poll found 71% of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area, with 48% strongly opposed. That’s higher opposition than to a local nuclear plant, and it’s holding across political lines.

The surveillance side is moving even faster. Cities including Flagstaff, Santa Cruz, Cambridge, and Eugene have terminated their Flock AI contracts, with cameras deactivated and in many cases physically pulled down. Audits showing federal access to the footage and use of the cameras to track protesters have accelerated the rollback.

An AI-generated illustration evoking themes of labor, technology, and billionaire power in the age of artificial intelligence.

Jeff Bezos, whose net worth would take the average US worker 3.8 million years to match, has suddenly decided the bottom 50% of US earners should pay no federal income tax. “You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” he said. Bezos himself paid $0 in federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, when he was already a multibillionaire.

Elon Musk is pushing “universal high income,” a rebrand of UBI in which his humanoid robots somehow generate radical abundance for everyone. Sam Altman, who once funded UBI pilots, has pivoted to “universal basic compute,” where your income corresponds to a share of OpenAI’s revenue, a model that also locks ChatGPT in as the most important AI system on the planet.

There are real options none of them will float. A national moratorium on frontier AI training. Windfall taxes on AI profits funding actual worker support or public AI infrastructure. Community veto power and strict environmental standards on new data centers. Mandatory worker and public equity in the systems replacing people. Or simply slowing deployment until the job, energy, and surveillance impacts get assessed in public with democratic input. None of that is on the table. Tax tweaks and robot allowances are.

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