WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders has warned the heads of Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI to halt the development of artificial intelligence now or face the prospect of lawmakers doing it for them.
“Mr. [Sam] Altman, Mr. [Dario] Amodei and Mr. [Mark] Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster,” Sanders (I-Vt.) demanded in a Monday letter first reported by Axios.
“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, a longtime skeptic of the nascent technology, cited past statements from each company promising to pump the brakes on AI development if their systems became too risky to safely control. All three have recently reported incidents of their models going rogue.
“At a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses,” Sanders wrote, “your companies are still racing ahead — investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control.”
Earlier this year, Sanders called for the US to co-operate with China to rein in the “runaway train” of AI, which critics have warned would pose national security concerns and aid Beijing in the race to dominate the technology.
China has used AI to power a sprawling surveillance system to monitor its population. Many experts fear that if Beijing wins the AI race, it will get access to vast amounts of data on Western citizens.
Sanders has been particularly concerned about the risks that AI poses to jobs through automation and has pushed for a moratorium on the building of new data centers to enhance the top models.
However, the socialist’s efforts have fallen flat so far.
However, Democrats could take over one or both chambers of Congress in the November midterm elections and launch a series of probes into the tech companies.
Reps for Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.