The core conservative argument is economic and geopolitical. The American Enterprise Institute’s work frames AI primarily as a growth engine. In their analysis of whether AI could cause “explosive” economic growth, scholars like Tamay Besiroglu put meaningful odds-on AI dramatically raising productivity potentially many times the roughly 2% annual growth the U.S. has averaged for a century by automating not just labor but the process of innovation itself, creating a self-reinforcing loop of discovery. Even the more cautious voices in that same AEI discussion, like Matt Clancy, who peg explosive growth at only 10–20%, still treat AI as a real productivity story that points to concrete gains. For example, AT&T reporting forms that took hours are now taking two minutes, and developer productivity is rising by 20 to 50%.
For conservatives, this growth connects to a bigger theme: We call it American leadership. The Hoover Institution frames frontier AI as central to preserving a “democratic advantage” over authoritarian rivals, like China. In their view, the technology is a strategic asset that the U.S. cannot afford to cede, which is why much of the right resists slowing it down. This is also the logic behind the Trump administration’s posture; Both Vice President Vance and The Heritage Foundation have both been publicly wary of aggressive regulation, arguing it would hand the lead to adversaries like China and Russia. Underlying all of this is a philosophical preference for what conservative’s call “permissionless innovation” or the belief that letting entrepreneurs build first and correct specific harms later has historically produced more prosperity than trying to pre-approve every technology.
The problems the “right” actually worries about: It would be a mistake to read conservatives as uniformly technology-optimists. Heritage’s “federalist approach,” by Wesley Hodges and Daniel Cochrane, explicitly calls for some “commonsense safeguards” guardrails on mental-health chatbots, child-safety protections, and pushback against ideological bias baked into these new AI systems ( there is a recurring conservative complaint that models lean left which this author concurs with). Notably, Heritage rejected Senator Cruz’s proposed decade-long moratorium on state AI regulation as too extreme, arguing “AI is too complex and fast-moving for a top-down ‘silver bullet’ solution”. Their current preferred model treats states as “laboratories of democracy” testing different rules.
Beyond a regulation philosophy: the concrete harms conservatives cite include job displacement (The American Enterprise Institute has an entire strand of work on the unsettling scenario of “lots of growth without many workers”), concentration of power in a few large tech firms, erosion of children’s wellbeing, deepfakes and disinformation, and prominently in the national-security literature the weaponization of AI by hostile states and terrorists. Hoover’s authors (Philip Zelikow, former DHS official Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and former NSA/intelligence figure Jason Matheny) have single out “powerful open-weights models” which are freely downloadable systems that can’t be recalled as a distinct danger for bioweapons and cyberattacks.
The rogue-AI catastrophe question: This is where the conservative movement genuinely splits, and it’s worth being honest about that. One camp treats existential or catastrophic risk from autonomous AI as real. While The Dispatch a center-right outlet ran Jonathan Gibson’s “Will AI Go Rogue?”, which takes the concern seriously enough to note the strange new coalition that it has produced of Silicon Valley safety researchers aligning with both populist and progressive politicians who normally distrust each other. The article centers MIT’s Max Tegmark and the Future of Life Institute, which candidly acknowledging that “some analysts view the threat as hypothetical rather than imminent”. They say the Dispatch has gone AI Rogue. The scenario that worries this camp is a highly capable, goal-directed system pursuing objectives misaligned with human intent and pursuing self-preservation, resource acquisition, or deception in ways its designers didn’t sanction and can’t easily shut off. The Hoover national-security work, without endorsing science-fiction framings, effectively treats loss-of-control and misuse as serious enough to warrant government capacity to independently evaluate frontier models before deployment.
The other camp well represented at Heritage and among the administration’s allies: regards acute “rogue AI wipes out humanity” scenarios as speculative and worries more that fear of them will be used to justify heavy regulation that entrenches incumbents and slows American progress. We are already seeing many prominent Democrats already out in front demonizing AI as a serious threat and danger and should be strongly regulated by government. In this view the near-term, tangible harms (fraud, bias, security misuse) deserve attention while the existential framing should be treated with skepticism.
An honest bottom line: The strongest version of the conservative case is roughly this: AI is likely to be one of the great wealth- and capability-generating technologies of the era, and the surest way to get its benefits while managing its dangers is to keep America in the lead, address specific harms with targeted and preferably state-level rules, along with building serious national-security defenses against misuse rather than imposing sweeping precautionary regulation aimed at hypothetical catastrophes which is the scenario that the Dem’s are trying to sell before the midterms.
The fair counterpoints: some raised by conservatives themselves: even sympathetic economists like Clancy note that past general-purpose technologies (electricity, computers) never actually broke the 2% growth trend, so the “explosive growth” promise may be overstated; a light-touch approach could underweight tail risks that, if real, are irreversible; and the argument that “we must not slow down or China wins” can become a way to avoid safety trade-offs that even hawks like Schmidt and Matheny think are necessary. Where a given person lands depends heavily on how likely they judge the low-probability, high-consequence scenarios to be which remains a genuine and unsettled empirical dispute, not a settled fact. In the meantime, the conservative Republican position will continue to Trust but Verify while the Democrats will continue to scream and holler that if not controlled by the government AI will go rogue and destroy us.
Once again, folks, “We Get the Government We Deserve.”
