Sanders urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to pause AI work

Senator Bernie Sanders urged Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to pause AI development, warning that the US Senate will regulate the sector if companies keep deploying systems at their current pace. In a letter to the companies’ CEOs, Sanders said frontier models have reached a critical risk threshold and called on them to “stop building machines that humans cannot control.”

Sanders cited reports that AI was used to develop new viruses and said misuse could lead to bioweapons that cause the deaths of “tens of millions of people”. He also pointed to company disclosures that their models had hacked other companies’ servers, arguing that the incidents show a loss of control. Some experts have cautioned that OpenAI’s claims about a model going rogue may be overblown and could make the technology appear more dangerous, and therefore more powerful, than it is.

The letter follows an appeal from more than 1,300 scientists and developers who warned that AI development is moving too quickly for risks to be identified and addressed. Sanders said the companies had previously promised to pause scaling or deployment when safety thresholds were crossed, and argued that recent hacking incidents mean that moment has arrived. He has also pushed for a moratorium on US datacenter construction alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while federal safeguards are developed.