AI Has Gone MAGA

Tech broadly, but artificial intelligence specifically, is being MAGA-coded. This is not entirely new. Peter Thiel backed President Trump in his first run for the White House, and Larry Ellison endorsed him in 2020. Marc Andreessen and most significantly Elon Musk attached themselves to Trump as part of this election cycle. Andreessen articulated reasons involving AI regulation, and while Musk’s public statements of support are not focused on AI, it is worth noting that he owns GROK, which is one of the leading large language models, and has made plans to build one of the largest AI-training structures in the world.

This is not the first time AI has been a part of the culture wars. Right-leaning commentators took aim at Google products and others for being too “woke” in early 2024. In fact, GROK was positioned as a counterweight to these models.

However, something different is happening now—the technology itself is being MAGA-coded. Tech leaders were literally front and center at Trump’s inauguration. In a striking development, Trump, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank co-announced an enormous investment in AI infrastructure, which Trump framed in reference to U.S. dominance and jobs. The actual involvement of Trump in negotiating and funding this venture is not particularly clear, but it also is not the point we are making here.

There are other signals as well. Right-wing activist and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich posted criticism on X of a new OpenAI product for using only liberal-coded news sites. Sam Altman replied directly with a promise to fix the problem as fast as possible. Trump’s new executive order on AI states, “We must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas” and in this way frames the administration’s perspective as ideologically neutral—a key phrase in the culture war lexicon.

This technology is linked with President Trump and his allies in the public imagination. The image of Trump next to Altman and others is more important than any underlying policy or promise. Rather than a site of contestation over how “woke” any particular model is, the technology itself is becoming linked with Trump and the broader MAGA movement. This is in obvious tension with higher education, which is coded as liberal in the public imagination. There are strong indicators the partisan divide is driving national trends on the perceived worth of college education. So what are the implications of a MAGA-coded technology interfacing with a liberal-coded institution?

A New Site of ‘Resistance’

Faculty and commentators have been consistently pointing out the ethical problems with AI as a technology. This has included concerns about copyright issues, environmental impacts and energy usage, to say nothing of the disruptions to classrooms and student learning. Sometimes these arguments have been engaged in good faith. Other times they seem like a convenient intellectual cover for resistance to change. We predict that the political coding of AI will become a new and even more potent strain of resistance. It will be easy for liberal faculty to dismiss the technology as a tool of the government and/or MAGA movement that we must resist. Even faculty who are not overtly political may think twice about engaging with the technology for fear of being politically coded in the same way driving a Tesla is today.

Institutional Tension

Beyond the individual classroom, some institutions, like Arizona State University, the University of Michigan and most recently the entire California State University system, have entered into agreements with AI platforms. The desire for enterprise adoption by tech giants and institutions continues to grow, especially as the platforms offer dedicated server space to reduce concerns about data security and perks like training resources are added into deals. We predict that as some of these platforms become MAGA-coded there will be pushes from academic senates and other groups on campus to divest, in a manner similar to pushes to cut links with fossil fuels or firearms. If this technology becomes politically coded, we will see downstream impacts on issues like fundraising and recruitment.

How Should We Proceed?

The rise of politically charged technologies challenges us to reflect on our role as educators—not as passive consumers of tools but as active shapers of how these tools are understood and applied. The future of both AI and higher education depends on our ability to engage with these tensions constructively. We suggest that we work to avoid the culture war trap when it comes to this technology. Higher education should not double down as a site of uncritical opposition or “resistance.”

In this dynamic, everything becomes black-and-white and flat. Important perspectives, other technologies and even other actors get overlooked when this happens. AI has now entered the culture war, and we suggest that universities and their faculty, staff and students remain focused on figuring out how these technologies work, what they are and are not useful for, and what they might mean for the future of higher education.