Sen. Bernie Sanders has pushed the debate over the AI pause into Congress, warning the leaders of Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI to stop advancing artificial intelligence now or risk seeing lawmakers force the issue for them. In a letter sent Monday, the Vermont independent told Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg that they should back up their own past promises and slow the race before it goes too far.
Sanders said the companies should act “in the interest of humanity” and warned that the Senate could intervene if they do not. He told the executives, “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, has long criticized the direction of the technology and said the companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on systems that no one can fully understand, predict or control.
The AI pause warning came as Sanders pointed to recent incidents in which all three companies have reported their models behaving in troubling ways. He also cited earlier public statements from the firms suggesting they would slow development if their systems became too risky to manage safely. Sanders framed the issue as one of basic control, saying there has already been “human loss of control” and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses.
The senator has also tied the issue to national security and the global competition with China. Earlier this year, he called for the United States to work with China to restrain what he described as a “runaway train” of AI. Critics of unchecked development have warned that the technology could help Beijing in its effort to dominate the field, while China already uses AI in a broad surveillance system to monitor its population. Sanders and other skeptics have also focused on the impact of automation on American jobs, an issue that continues to resonate with workers who fear being pushed aside by rapid technological change.
