AI fears acquaint a man with strange bedfellows.
Far-left Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-winger Steve Bannon are joining forces to push for stricter restrictions on artificial intelligence, a surprising team-up that highlights growing backlash to the new tech across the political aisle.
The Vermont democratic socialist and onetime chief strategist to President Trump were scheduled to speak Tuesday at a Washington, DC, rally calling for firm human control of AI and accountability for the companies developing it.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) were also headlining the “Pro-Human Assembly” event, along with stars like Ashley Judd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, according to the organizer’s website.
The rally, put on by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, comes after months of protests across the country in which Americans have blasted AI data centers for potential noise and light pollution. Fears that artificial intelligence will eventually replace workers in all kinds of jobs have also made the tech unpopular among voters — just over three in five of them oppose construction of new data centers, according to a New York Times/Siena University poll released Tuesday.
Fears around the tech ramped up last week after Jacob Coxon, a researcher who previously worked at Anthropic and OpenAI, quit his job and issued a chilling warning that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy essay urging rival companies to slow their work on AI models, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk also spoke out about the risks of unchecked development.
Bannon, a godfather of the MAGA movement, has departed from the president’s views on AI, arguing there should be more government regulation of the industry.
During his podcast “Bannon’s War Room” on Monday, Bannon said Congress should not ban states from enforcing their own restrictions on the new technology.
“The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, has shrugged off concerns around the AI industry, alleging they resemble a “conspiracy.”
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” the president wrote in a Truth Social post Monday.
He said warnings about AI posing a risk to humanity are a “HOAX” and specifically called out Amodei — whose company has feuded on-and-off with the White House — for “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’”
Last month, Sanders urged the heads of Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI to halt the development of the tech. The Vermont senator has called for laws pausing work on AI models capable of “overthrowing or undermining the US government.”
Last year, his office predicted that AI and automation could wipe out nearly 100 million jobs in the US over the next decade — part of an ongoing series of apocalyptic predictions about the tech.
Liz Shuler, president of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the country, was also scheduled to speak at Tuesday’s event.