WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders is pressing the leaders of Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI to immediately stop advancing artificial intelligence systems, warning that Congress may step in if the companies refuse to slow down on their own.
“Mr. [Sam] Altman, Mr. [Dario] Amodei and Mr. [Mark] Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster,” Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Monday letter first reported by Axios.
“Stop building machines that humans cannot control … If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.”
Sanders, 84, who has long voiced alarm over the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, pointed to previous commitments from the three companies suggesting they would slow or pause AI development if their systems became too dangerous to manage safely. Each company has recently disclosed episodes in which its models behaved in unexpected or uncontrolled ways.
“At a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses,” Sanders wrote, “your companies are still racing ahead — investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control.”
The warning follows Sanders’ earlier call this year for the United States to work with China to restrain what he described as the “runaway train” of AI. Critics of that approach have argued that cooperation with Beijing could raise national security risks and strengthen China’s push to lead the global artificial intelligence race.
China has already deployed AI to support an expansive surveillance apparatus aimed at monitoring its own population. Some experts have warned that a Chinese advantage in AI could also give Beijing access to enormous amounts of data involving citizens in the West.
Sanders has focused much of his criticism on the threat AI-driven automation could pose to workers. He has also advocated for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers designed to power and improve the most advanced AI models.
However, the socialist’s efforts have fallen flat so far.
However, Democrats could take over one or both chambers of Congress in the November midterm elections and launch a series of probes into the tech companies.
Reps for Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
