Dan Osborn was finishing up his fourth town hall last Sunday, he says, when a “hardcore MAGA” guy approached him. Osborn, who is running for the US Senate in Nebraska as an independent against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, said that he and the man didn’t have much common ground—at first.

“Then I said, ‘Hey, what’s your take on AI and data centers?’” Osborn says. “Boy, right away, we were in lockstep, 100 percent agreement.”

Osborn is one of more than 15 politicians running for office in states across the country who have signed onto the AI Pact, a set of five promises around regulating both data centers and AI itself. As concerns about data centers have exploded in the midterm cycle, politicians are scrambling to respond to voters’ worries about their environmental impacts, the secrecy surrounding their construction, and the corporate power behind them. The new pledge is intended, according to its website, to provide “a needed baseline to ensure a humanity-first future.”

The pact is an offshoot of the Political Integrity Project, an anti-money in politics group that has a similar pledge for candidates. Daniel Lobo-Lewis, one of the founders, says that he and his other cofounders came up with the five promises in the AI Pact—which include advocating for mandatory safety reviews for AI models, supporting policies that would create an AI dividend for workers, and ensuring that consumers and companies can sue over harms caused by models—by networking with AI safety groups and other political organizations working on AI legislation.

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