The AI vibe shift is real: Why the backlash is growing | Mashable
'Let them drink tokens': A protestor at the Project Blue data center in Tucson, Arizona.
Credit: Mamta Popat/Arizona Daily Star via Getty Images
You've heard of AI vibe coding, one dictionary's phrase of the year for 2025. As of this week, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the AI vibe shift.<br>You wouldn't know the shift existed from the tech world's top pronouncements of late; it is, after all, always sunny in Silicon Valley. Microsoft's Build conference, like Google I/O in May, featured tons of techies talking about tokens, the metric by which AI prompts and answers are measured (a token, weirdly, is about three-quarters of a word on average).<br>Both conferences also centered claims about frontier AI that are dubious to say the least. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at Google I/O: "Artificial General Intelligence is just a few years away... we are standing in the foothills of the Singularity." Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: "scaling laws are holding... we are building towards what we call Humanist Superintelligence."
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Wall Street was still buying it, but investors were wavering. The ultimate AI bellwether, Nvidia stock, tumbled for a few days, rallied after CEO Jensen Huang insisted AI agents will run everything, everywhere in the future (presumably once they've stopped deleting databases), then got pummeled again on Friday.<br>Still, for now, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX continue to chase trillion-dollar IPOs, the latter based in large part on the untested concept of AI data centers in space.
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Regardless, outside the AI bubble, a backlash has been brewing for some time — and not only among students booing pro-AI commencement speakers.<br>Just 10 percent of Americans say they're thrilled about the future of AI, a Pew poll found in March; that same month, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in an NBC poll said neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing a good job on the AI front.<br>That number also appears in an April survey of white-collar workers: 80 percent are straight-up refusing to use AI even when it's mandated. In the last 30 days, 54 percent of workers reported bypassing company AI tools and completing jobs themselves.<br>Those numbers suggest general strike-levels of discontent with AI across every industry, out there in the real America beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, if not an outright revolutionary mood.<br>Data center protests, fueled by the 70 percent of Americans who say they don't want data centers near them, are only likely to grow going forward — especially now that they are producing tangible results.<br>At least 48 data center projects were blocked or delayed in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and the fight is only getting more fierce. Take the planned Stratos data center in Utah, where local opposition just forced VC and Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary to downsize his land usage by 75 percent.<br>"We screwed up," O'Leary told local TV news Friday. "We pissed off a lot of people."<br>'Let them eat tokens'<br>And the threat of electoral guillotines may explain why politicians are starting to propose serious action.<br>This week alone, Senator Bernie Sanders came out in favor of the U.S. public owning a 50 percent stake in AI companies, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed an AI tax, and President Trump finally signed an executive order on AI regulation that his AI czar, Silicon Valley titan David Sacks, has long opposed.<br>On Friday, New York State legislators sent a one-year data center moratorium to the governor's desk — and Trump seemed to come around to Sanders' way of thinking on the government taking an ownership stake in OpenAI. Some who doubt OpenAI's current worth saw it as a bailout.<br>The White House's AI executive order was announced while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was making rosy pronouncements on AI at Build, adding to the surreal sense that we're watching a tale of two worlds — the anti-AI people versus an out-of-touch AI regime that says, essentially, let them eat tokens.<br>But hold the revolution: Just below the surface (and the Microsoft Surface Ultra), the AI regime is showing signs of cracking all on its own — and it's all down to those tokens.<br>Silicon Valley's AI backlash begins<br>When it comes to AI true-believer companies, they don't get much truer than Uber. The rideshare giant says 90 percent of its engineers use AI tools, mostly Anthropic's Claude Code. As much as 10 percent of Uber's codebase is written by AI agents.<br>Uber also had leaderboards that encouraged as much usage of AI tokens as possible; in Silicon Valley, this is known as tokenmaxxing, and it was really hot in 2025.<br>Then the tokenmaxxing bill came due. "The budget I thought I would need [for 2026] is blown away already,” CTO Neppalli Naga told The Information on April 14 — less than four months into the year.<br>At the...