The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that a growing chorus of voices from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill is calling for swift action to regulate artificial intelligence, with some warning that the rapidly developing technology could soon exterminate humanity. The Globe's Adrian Morrow writes that across the United States, meanwhile, local battles are erupting in major cities and small towns over plans to build hundreds of the electricity- and water-guzzling data centres needed to power the AI boom. U.S. President Donald Trump, however, is fighting any effort to put guardrails around AI, arguing that doing so would cede an innovation advantage to China amid a geopolitical showdown. All of which explains why, just six weeks before November's U.S. midterm elections, the issue of what to do about AI has shot up the political agenda. In Washington this week, both Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, and Steve Bannon, a leader of Mr. Trump's MAGA movement, delivered surprisingly similar messages. The push to create rules for AI has also received a boost from industry executives themselves, with Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all calling for the pace of development to be slowed.