Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to ‘pause AI development’ in interest of humanity

Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace.

In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology.

“Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development,” Sanders’s letter, first reported by Axios, read. “It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”

The Vermont senator cited recent reports that AI was used to develop new viruses, warning that if this technology fell into the “wrong hands” it might “lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people”.

All three companies have also disclosed their models hacked other companies’ servers, a sign that the firms have lost control over their models, Sanders wrote.

“Yoshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, said these incidents ‘should serve as a wake-up call,’ I agree,” Sanders wrote in the letter.

Experts, however, have cautioned that OpenAI’s claims that its AI model went rogue may be overblown as part of a media campaign to make their technology seem highly dangerous, and thus extremely powerful.

“And yet, at a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies are still racing ahead – investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control,” he continued.

Sanders’ letter comes after more than 1,300 scientists and developers from across the tech industry published another letter warning that AI development is moving at a pace that makes it difficult to address and identify the risks of the technology. Companies and countries are facing intense competitive pressure to move quickly. In the open letter, the engineers and other staffers called on the US government to help coordinate an international effort to slow down the development of frontier models so that regulators could create safety guardrails around the tech.

The companies have previously committed to pausing their AI development if certain risk thresholds were met – but the companies did not detail exactly what those limits would entail.

Anthropic said it would “commit to pause the scaling and/or delay the deployment of new models whenever our scaling ability outstrips our ability to comply with … safety procedures”.

OpenAI, which said it would slow down the development of its latest cybersecurity model, Astra, after the autonomous hack of another organization, said it would “halt further development” if AI capabilities met a “critical” threshold until guardrails were implemented.

Sanders said recent hacking incidents were signs that the threshold has been surpassed.

“That moment is here,” his letter reads. “AI capabilities HAVE reached a critical threshold. There is a reason why the head of the CIA says that AI models are ‘akin to digital nuclear weapons’ and ‘almost like a doomsday device.’”

The progressive senator previously called for a moratorium on datacenter construction across the US. He and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill to pause the building of new datacenters in the US in March. Their rationale was similar to Sanders’ case for pausing the development of AI models: a temporary ban, the lawmakers said, would give the US government time to create strong federal safeguards for AI.