At a closed-door Democratic fundraising event in Manhattan on Thursday, former President Barack Obama urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his party to put artificial intelligence at the heart of their governing agenda. The former president said Democrats should be ready, if they retake the House, to create a framework for a broad public debate over the technology.¹

Obama’s message was both a warning and an opening. AI, he said, is advancing rapidly in private hands, and “if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous.” But he also argued that effective oversight could preserve its upside, including faster drug development and treatments that could help cure disease.²

He went further than a generic call for regulation. Obama advised would-be 2028 presidential candidates to make AI one of their “central agendas” and arrive with “a very clear plan” for its safety risks and economic consequences.¹ The intervention amounts to a push for Democrats to turn a fast-moving technical issue into a defining political contrast in the midterms and beyond.

Jeffries embraced that framing, saying “decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence” and accusing Republicans of having “abdicated their responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people.”² The critique points directly at President Donald Trump, who has voiced concern about safety guardrails but also cast the global AI race in competitive terms: “whoever wins AI wins.”²

The debate is also shifting inside the industry. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has proposed independent safety evaluations and common standards for frontier models, while OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said his company would support evaluators with employee-like access.² Obama’s argument is that Washington cannot leave those choices solely to the firms building the systems.