MW J.D. Vance calls AI a 'communist technology.' Is there partisan bias in new tech tools?

By Chris Matthews

The vice president warned crypto boosters to 'keep tabs' on the artificial-intelligence industry

Vice President J.D. Vance lobbed a salvo in an emerging tech-industry culture war at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday - branding artificial intelligence as a "communist technology" and casting crypto as a freedom-promoting counterweight.

The comments are red meat for a crypto community that grew to despise President Joe Biden's administration and its attitude toward digital-asset regulation, and underscore anxieties that tech changes emerging from Silicon Valley could have long-lasting and decisive affects on the partisan balance of power in Washington.

Vance said that though it's a slight "overstatement" to say that crypto is a "conservative technology" while AI is "a left-leaning or communist technology," he added that there's a "fundamental element of truth" to this divide.

"What I've noticed is that very smart right-wing people in tech tend to be attracted to bitcoin (BTCUSD) and crypto, and very smart left-wing people in tech tend to be attracted to AI," Vance added.

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Industry leaders in both crypto and artificial intelligence have sought to dismiss notions that crypto is for Republicans and that large language models display partisan bias toward Democrats. But there is research that supports this view, even if the vice president's rhetoric exaggerates the case.

Findings from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School back up Vance's claim, in part. A November study by marketing professors Cait Lamberton, David Rubenstein and John Zhang found that "as political conservatism increases, so does confidence in cryptocurrency."

That's partly because conservatives are more likely to trust decentralized systems, the authors wrote, based on survey data collected for the report.

"Rather that feeling that trust is best placed in institutions like the Federal Reserve, conservatives tend to place more stock in distributed trust," they noted.

Meanwhile, large language models including ChatGPT - which has received major backing from Microsoft $(MSFT)$ - Google's $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ Gemini and Meta's $(META)$ Llama are perceived by the public at large to give answers to questions that are left-leaning, according to a study published earlier this month by Stanford University political scientist Andrew Hall and colleagues.

"We find that nearly all [AI] models are perceived as significantly left-leaning - even by Democrats," Hall wrote in a summary of the research.

Hall found that if prompted to take a neutral stance, most models will adjust their answers such that users surveyed by the authors perceived the output as more neutral.

Whether or not these effects are the result of AI engineers' politics is unknown, but Vance said he wants crypto technologists to stay informed about their colleagues' work at AI labs.

"I'd ask you all to remember that what happens in AI is very much going to affect in good and bad ways what happens in bitcoin," Vance said. "Make sure you're keeping tabs on and staying involved in what's happening in artificial intelligence."

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-Chris Matthews

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May 28, 2025 15:11 ET (19:11 GMT)

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