Democratic members of Congress signaled after the Nov. 3 midterm election that they plan to use new oversight powers to investigate technology executives with close ties to the Trump administration, the Deseret News reported.
The newspaper said high-ranking Democrats expected to chair committees in the new term have cited alleged corruption as the basis for future investigations of industry leaders who donated to President Donald Trump's projects or lent their products for government use. The Deseret News did not name those incoming chairs in the report.
The turn comes after Democratic candidates campaigned on curtailing data centers and regulating artificial intelligence, according to former U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart, a Utah Republican who founded a nonprofit that seeks AI safeguards. Stewart told the Deseret News the investigations also reflect anger over prominent AI chief executives — he named SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg — who, in his description, moved toward Trump after previously being major Democratic donors.
"Democrats feel betrayed by that," Stewart said. "They're angry at Silicon Valley leaders and they think they're too closely aligned with Republicans now. And, frankly, they want to punish them." He later added that Democrats "are angry at them for shifting their allegiance" and that "they don't like billionaires."
Stewart's account is one Republican's reading of the incoming majority's motives, not an official Democratic statement. Tech companies' responses were not included in the Deseret News report, apart from comments Palantir CEO Alex Karp made to Politico that the newspaper summarized.
Voters and a Palantir aside
The Deseret News said a wave of opposition to AI infrastructure ran through the midterms, with 40 of the 41 measures restricting data-center development across the country receiving voter approval. That figure is the newspaper's tally; it did not list the measures one by one.
On Karp, the paper said the Palantir chief had won White House favor after criticizing "wokeness" and allowing his company's data-management software to track illegal immigrants, then on Wednesday told Politico he knew more about being a progressive "than almost anybody on the planet" and that Palantir's products are "essentially progressive." Those remarks were reported secondhand by the Deseret News; Politico's own story was not independently reviewed for this article.
Stewart's own project
Stewart, an Air Force veteran who served a decade in the House and sat on the Intelligence Committee, founded a group called Public First to push for what he describes as proactive AI guardrails. The Deseret News said Public First received $20 million from Anthropic, which is itself a frontier AI lab and one of the companies named in a separate San Francisco lawsuit filed Thursday seeking to freeze new advanced models. The Deseret News report did not present that donation as related to the planned congressional investigations.
Stewart told the paper that, beyond partisan motives, some innovators do need to be held accountable. How far incoming committee chairs actually go, and whom they subpoena, will not be clear until the new Congress is seated.