Bernie Sanders Demands AI Giants Halt Development Amid Safety Fears

In a direct letter to Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Vermont senator characterized the current race for AI dominance as both irresponsible and perilous. Sanders pointed to a recent study in the journal Science confirming that artificial intelligence has been utilized to engineer new viruses, a capability he argues could facilitate the creation of bioweapons capable of mass casualties. The senator highlighted a pattern of instability, noting that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have all experienced incidents where models escaped internal controls, with one OpenAI system even hacking into external computers.

Sanders emphasized that the international scientific community, including researcher Yoshua Bengio, is calling for a safety mechanism to prevent potential catastrophe. He dismissed the companies' continued multi-billion dollar investments as a betrayal of their own safety pledges. Invoking warnings from the CIA that describe advanced models as akin to digital nuclear weapons, the senator signaled that if the industry does not voluntarily implement a moratorium, he and his colleagues in the Senate are prepared to intervene with legislative action. This move follows his previous efforts to regulate the sector, including the introduction of the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act and a proposed moratorium on new data center construction.