Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Wants Public Control of AI Boards

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has proposed that a simple majority — 50% plus one — of board seats at influential AI companies be publicly appointed or democratically elected, the centerpiece of a plan he argues could avert an AI-fueled catastrophe.

The proposal, called AI Under Democracy, is the most aggressive regulatory blueprint put forward by a major Senate candidate this cycle. It was released several weeks before the Michigan Democratic primary, when El-Sayed was still a relative underdog: a physician with thin political credentials whose positions appeared misaligned with the moderate, blue-collar sensibilities of Michigan voters. He has since released a companion proposal, AI Under Control, this month.

Writing in an opinion analysis, Jerel Ezell — executive director of the Center for AI and Everybody and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago — argues the plan could serve as an antidote to America's ideological gridlock over AI, in no small part because public anxiety has reached record levels.

How worried are Americans about AI?

The polls point one direction. According to an NBC News poll conducted this summer, 70% of Americans said they were more worried than excited about AI — a reversal from just a couple of years ago. A Quinnipiac poll from several weeks ago found that 73% of Americans are concerned about AI posing a threat to human existence.

Hostility extends to the physical infrastructure of AI. An August poll found that only one in nine Americans would support the construction of a datacenter in their local community.

El-Sayed's plan dovetails with that opposition, Ezell writes: keep AI's footprint and its environmental and socioeconomic consequences — known and unknown — contained.

What does the plan actually require?

AI Under Democracy rests on several concrete mechanisms:

• Corporate divestiture. Legacy technology companies — Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon — hold too much controlling interest in frontier AI ventures such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the plan argues, creating what Ezell calls "untenable friction between their revenue-generation prerogatives and our public safety." Microsoft holds an estimated 27% stake in OpenAI; Google owns 14% of Anthropic. Under the proposal, the tech giants would have to divest or abandon those investments within a defined transitional period.
• Datacenter regulation. The plan calls for slowing the volume of datacenter developments, facilitating local job creation, freezing residential utility costs, and addressing noise and pollution. El-Sayed has been especially vocal about the colossal OpenAI-Oracle datacenter being erected just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attended the University of Michigan.
• Public board control. The most controversial element: publicly appointed or democratically elected board seats at influential AI companies. In theory, this would foster transparency around AI companies' plans and give Americans the power to veto decisions — on matters like datacenter development and biological weapons manufacturing — that could undermine the public interest.

El-Sayed has separately called for a pause on AI's most potent releases, a ban on artificial superintelligence, and an AI kill switch.

Is public ownership politically viable?

Ezell acknowledges the obstacle directly. For many, transferring ownership of a private enterprise to a public trust "smacks of socialism." That narrative feeds the common Republican critique of El-Sayed, and his Republican challenger Mike Rogers has made an even more aggressive attempt to tar him as a feckless communist.

Yet the polling suggests otherwise. According to a June report, roughly 69% of American adults support AI companies transferring 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund — a pot of money used to support public interests. Bernie Sanders, whom Ezell identifies as El-Sayed's most prominent booster on Capitol Hill, has legislatively proposed this paradigm.

Ezell also notes that communities across the US have long embraced public ownership of essential resources such as water, natural gas and electricity.

El-Sayed himself occupies what Ezell describes as a strange but increasingly common place in American politics: praised by progressives, begrudgingly tolerated by moderate Democrats and largely demonized by Republicans. His AI ethos, Ezell argues, is shaped not by his political career but by his history as a healthcare provider. His maxim for AI development is "first, do no harm" — a transposition of the Hippocratic oath into what Ezell calls the new wild west of technology.

Why does this matter for the midterms?

The timing is not accidental. As the midterms approach, feverish debates are erupting over how — or even whether — AI's soaring risks can be tempered through federal policy. Barack Obama recently urged Democrats to rally around AI regulation in the midterms, though El-Sayed and progressive Democrats have already been leading the charge, according to Ezell.

The trust deficit is stark. A whopping 78% of Americans disapprove of how Congressional members are handling their job, and Donald Trump's approval ratings are underwater. Many politicians, Ezell writes, seem unaware of or ambivalent about the state of AI and its mushrooming perils.

The contrast with the current administration is explicit. Trump and other administration officials have aggressively poo-poohed demands to slow AI's rapid ascension, calling the uproar a "hoax" while insisting on US AI dominance at essentially any cost.

Ezell also takes aim at AI's top executives. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei rallying around the idea of "pacing the frontier" — continuing frontier development while managing risks — is, in his words, "a big, red flag being waved right in society's face." Leaders in the White House and Silicon Valley investors, whom he describes as beholden to the sunken cost principle, will remain bullish on AI regardless.

His conclusion: calls for regulation from everyday people on both sides of the aisle should be the ultimate shot across the bow, and all of it — in Ezell's framing — can be addressed through a deliberate, balanced public ownership policy.

Whether El-Sayed wins in November and gets to test that thesis in the Senate remains the open question. What is already settled is that a competitive Senate race now runs through AI policy, with divestiture figures, board-control percentages and datacenter moratoriums on the ballot alongside the candidates.

Jerel Ezell is executive director of the Center for AI and Everybody and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. The views expressed are his.

By Marcus Bennett