Nine Towns Passed the AI Slowdown. Washington Calls It a Hoax.

In Millville, New Jersey, the city council settled the question with an ordinance: no data centers inside the city limits. Not a study commission, not a pilot program — a ban, the local face of a populist backlash likened to the anti-fracking movement ^[1]. Millville is not an outlier. It is the ninth name on a list that was already long by mid-August: Indianapolis, frozen through 2027; Anderson County, South Carolina; Gregg Township, Pennsylvania; Greensboro; Carter County; Westover; Calvert County, where the freeze landed after Amazon walked away from a $22 billion proposal; Camden, which moved to protect the Tug Hill Aquifer ^[2]. A data center is the physical plant of the AI boom — the windowless server warehouses where the models actually live — and this is what a slowdown looks like when it is written into law. Not a pledge: a zoning code, enforceable against a parcel map. Washington discovered the idea weeks later. When Anthropic's Dario Amodei called for slowing the frontier and rivals Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly endorsed an industrywide pause — three competing CEOs asking for one brake — it consumed the capital ^[3]. The towns were already past the asking. Washington read the warnings as an attack. From Doonbeg, Ireland, President Trump gave the labs' extinction talk his full verdict.

The robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen. — Donald Trump

His AI czar, David Sacks, said it more procedurally — accusing the labs of bartering safety commitments for government concessions — and assigned the warnings a motive and an election date ^[4].

It feels like bartering. — David Sacks

At the zoning level, the same words are not a conspiracy. They are a reason to vote. Bill McKibben, making the case for the bans, reached for the industry's own number.

There's really no other way for Americans to stand up to a technology whose own creators say offers a 10% chance of driving the human race to extinction within the next decade. — Bill McKibben

It would be tidy to call all this an AI-safety uprising, and it would be wrong. Camden was protecting its aquifer. Calvert County was reacting to a deal that had already collapsed ^[2]. Amy Kremer, a former Tea Party organizer now leading a 34-stop Humans First tour through data-center country, says outright that she is not opposed to AI or to data centers; the demands are that taxpayers stop funding the construction and that local officials stop signing nondisclosure agreements in project negotiations ^[5]. The motives are water, money and land. What is not in dispute is the flag flying over them: the labs' own estimates, quoted back at the labs, carried as the banner of the bans. Consider the corner the companies are standing in. In Washington they describe the danger as potentially extinction-grade while asking for liability and antitrust waivers — Anthropic sought the antitrust waiver, OpenAI floated pacing in exchange for safety commitments ^[4] — and their preferred oversight plan would post evaluators inside the labs while letting the labs redact anything they deem security-sensitive, privileged or commercially sensitive ^[6]. You cannot tell the federal government your product might end the human race and then tell the Millville city council the same product is harmless tax base. The rooms can hear each other. So the industry has answered being believed. Not with reassurance — reassurance was never available from companies raising extinction odds — but with more than $75 million through a political action committee called Leading the Future to elect pro-AI candidates, and with a documented reliance, across the buildout, on nondisclosure agreements signed by the very local officials weighing the projects ^[1]. That is a $75 million answer aimed at a zoning board. An industry confident the warnings were false would argue the warnings. This one is buying the room. The nondisclosure agreement is the tell. It is the industry's one move toward the governments that took it at its word: not a safety briefing, a signature. The Data Center Coalition, the industry's trade group, warns that a moratorium tells builders a community is closed for business ^[2]. The organizers touring the moratorium belt want it in law: a ban on any local official signing the secrecy clause at all ^[5]. The building was banned first. The signature is next.