It was easy to miss this news amid all the talk about whether artificial intelligence will imminently “kill all humans,” a conversation sparked by researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic over fears that it and OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” The EPA’s announcement is nonetheless a clear win for Republicans and for the polluters who have been attacking rules to limit power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions since at least 2014, when the Obama administration first proposed its plan to cut power plant emissions. (The goal it set was to cut emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.) But Zeldin’s announcement is also a boon for the companies building AI data centers that are being predominantly powered by fossil fuels, including coal from old and revived coal plants. BloombergNEF has found that U.S. data centers are on track to consume more gas than most countries within a decade; 99 proposed gas-powered data center projects tracked by BloombergNEF could raise U.S. power-sector emissions by 20 percent.
In pouring cold water on the idea of regulating the AI industry, the Trump White House was pulling from a familiar playbook. The administration seems to have a one-size-fits-all approach to supporting its favorite industries, modeled on its generous handouts to the fossil fuel industry. That strategy isn’t especially complicated: Tear down regulatory barriers to growth, shower companies with tax breaks, and justify all of it in terms of national security. The overriding message here is to keep going as fast as possible for as long as possible—drill, baby, drill.
There are myriad reasons for the general public to be concerned about a gargantuan building binge getting carte blanche from the federal government to pollute. Thanks partly to new electricity demand from data centers, emissions from the power sector—the country’s second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions—rose by 4 percent last year, outpacing those from the rest of the economy. The engines and turbines that power them can emit nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter linked to worsening asthma, strokes, and premature death, and which can harm children’s developing brains and nervous systems. But hyperscalers themselves—who haven’t seemed terribly concerned about all that—could find that a “drill, baby, drill” approach may not be in their best interest, either.
Many things can be true at the same time: Amodei, Altman, and Musk really do seem to believe in the mounting existential risks of “superintelligence.” They could also have a financial interest in “pacing the frontier” and slowing down rapid-fire model development in ways that might protect the public too. There are any number of reasons to be skeptical of these executives’ intentions. OpenAI has lobbied extensively against state-level regulations on data centers and AI alike; OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife were MAGA Inc.’s largest donors in 2025. As much as Amodei has tried to position Anthropic as the “good guys,” his company is building a Minority Report–style “pre-crime” system that can alert authorities to crimes before they happen. So yes, it’s possible this is all just naked opportunism: Anthropic and OpenAI might just want to get relatively weak rules on the books while Republicans still control Congress and the White House. Maybe they’re banking on nothing passing at all, or just want to save face with a skeptical public.
There’s precedent for this kind of thing in the oil industry, of all places. As Oklahoma prospectors drilled furiously in the early twentieth century, they begged regulators to stop them from driving down prices to unsustainable levels and cratering the market. In 1931, Texas Governor Ross Stirling declared martial law and sent 800 Texas National Guard troops to pry workers off their pump-jacks in the name of keeping prices high.
Governments also don’t tend to like it when companies try to do that themselves. After years of oil and gas companies bingeing on debt to fund rapid-fire shale drilling, previously patient and generous Wall Street investors started to get nervous about that sector’s profitability. The industry began to practice “capital discipline,” prioritizing efficiency and returns over output. Among the loudest proponents of this approach was Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield. “Everybody’s going to be disciplined, regardless of whether it’s $75 Brent, $80 Brent, or $100 Brent,” Sheffield said publicly in 2021. “All the shareholders that I’ve talked to said that if anybody goes back to growth, they will punish those companies.” The Federal Trade Commission subsequently accused Sheffield of engaging in “a series of efforts to coordinate output levels to keep production artificially low.” As I wrote at the time, the politics of all this were disorienting. While Republicans accused the Biden administration of waging war on fossil fuels, its FTC singled out Sheffield for limiting production while approving his company’s merger with ExxonMobil; Trump’s FTC eventually dropped the issue last summer.
Silicon Valley might learn the hard way that being Trump’s favorite isn’t always a good thing. Hyperscalers have enjoyed the benefits of the EPA’s regulatory carve-outs for data centers and tried to preempt state regulations. They’ve spent years trying to get policymakers to tear down barriers to rapid-fire frontier model development, insisting that they’re the most responsible actors to be building mass-extinction machines. Amodei and Altman are probably not building a Machine God. They might reasonably want to stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year making machines they don’t fully understand, which they also believe could kill everyone. If these executives really do want frontier model development to be regulated, they should have to follow all the other lifesaving rules they’ve been skirting too.
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