{"slug": "bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails", "title": "Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon Share a Stage to Demand AI Guardrails", "summary": "Senator Bernie Sanders announced at the Future of Life Institute's Pro-Human Assembly in Washington DC on Tuesday that he will introduce legislation with Representative Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, saying \"Like nuclear weapons, artificial superintelligence is a threat to humanity, and it must be treated as such.\" Sanders shared the stage with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who focused his remarks on data centers being built in towns that never voted for them and on the small number of companies building the models, while Senators and Representatives including Richard Blumenthal, Chip Roy and Greg Casar also spoke. The event promoted the Pro-Human AI Declaration, which calls for human control over AI systems, limits on corporate power concentration, privacy protections, independent safety standards and legal accountability for AI harm.", "body_md": "*Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agree on almost nothing, but this week they shared a stage in Washington to demand Congress rein in artificial intelligence before it gets away from everyone.*\n\nThey don't agree on tariffs, immigration, or who should run the Federal Reserve. But on Tuesday, they stood on the same stage at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington DC and told Congress the same thing: AI is moving faster than anyone can steer it, and lawmakers need to act now, not after something breaks.\n\nThe event was organized by the Future of Life Institute, the nonprofit behind the Pro-Human AI Declaration, a document that calls for human control over AI systems, limits on how much power any one company can concentrate, privacy protections, independent safety standards and legal accountability when AI causes harm. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Rep. Chip Roy and Rep. Greg Casar also spoke, alongside actors, union leaders and an archbishop. It was, by any honest measure, a genuinely bipartisan lineup, which almost never happens on tech policy anymore.\n\nSanders used the stage to go further than a declaration. He announced he'll introduce legislation with Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence. \"Like nuclear weapons, artificial superintelligence is a threat to humanity, and it must be treated as such,\" Sanders said. The bill, as described, would freeze advanced AI development until clear safety rules exist.\n\nBannon didn't go that far. His complaint is more populist, aimed less at superintelligence as an abstract future threat and more at the data centers already going up in towns that never voted for them, and at the handful of companies building the models that will run inside those buildings.\n\n[Flock Safety's CEO Calls For Compromise As Cameras Draw Fire From Both Sides](https://startupfortune.com/flock-safetys-ceo-calls-for-compromise-as-cameras-draw-fire-from-both-sides/)\n\nFlock Safety CEO Garrett Langley called for a national 'compromise' on surveillance rules days after The Washington Post found at least 50 officers misusing the company's license-plate cameras to track exes. The $7.5 billion company now faces camera sabotage, a Bernie Sanders ban proposal, and a House Republican bill to block federal agencies from... - [flock safety cameras police surveillance controversy](https://startupfortune.com/flock-safetys-ceo-calls-for-compromise-as-cameras-draw-fire-from-both-sides/) - [license plate reader technology regulation debate](https://startupfortune.com/flock-safetys-ceo-calls-for-compromise-as-cameras-draw-fire-from-both-sides/)\n\n## The researchers who keep quitting\n\nBecause the AI industry's own researchers keep quitting and warning that the people running it are scared. On September 8, Jacob Coxon, who spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic, posted a seven-part thread on X announcing his resignation. It drew nearly 76 million views in a day, helped along by an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal. \"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,\" Coxon wrote, adding that he'd walked away from equity that hadn't vested yet to say so. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's head of alignment stress testing, publicly backed him up, saying he personally puts the odds of AI-caused human extinction within the next decade above 10 percent.\n\nGoogle DeepMind had its own version of the same story, twice in one week. Bilal Chughtai left DeepMind's AGI safety work in July. He wrote on LinkedIn that AI now has \"the potential to kill us all,\" describing a field that went from \"amusingly useless\" systems in 2022 to agent swarms capable of slipping their operators' control and running cyberattacks. Two days later, on September 13, his former teammate Josh Engels resigned too, citing a \"terrifying chance\" of catastrophe within five years, and turned down job offers from both OpenAI and Anthropic on the way out.\n\nEven the labs are talking like this now. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay over the weekend calling on AI companies to slow down, and got public agreement from OpenAI's Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk, two men not exactly known for endorsing caution.\n\nPlenty are sceptical. President Trump posted that the industry's sudden appetite for regulation is a \"hoax.\"\n\n## What happens next\n\nThat's the fight Sanders and Bannon just walked into together. Sanders wants a permanent ban written into law before superintelligence exists. Bannon wants the public angry at the data centers and the companies behind them before more get built. Neither of those is a bill sitting in a committee room yet, and a Republican Congress with a president who's already called the whole alarm fake is not an easy place to pass either one. What the Pro-Human Assembly proved is narrower than that, and still real: the coalition demanding AI oversight now spans from Vermont socialism to MAGA populism, and Congress can no longer treat that as a fringe position.\n\n**Also read:** [Larry Fink Says America's AI Power Crunch Could Widen the Wealth Gap](https://startupfortune.com/larry-fink-says-americas-ai-power-crunch-could-widen-the-wealth-gap/) • [OpenAI Will Retire GPT-5.5 From ChatGPT and Codex on October 14](https://startupfortune.com/openai-will-retire-gpt-55-from-chatgpt-and-codex-on-october-14/) • [Universal Music Group Sues DistroKid Over AI Slop Flooding Streaming](https://startupfortune.com/universal-music-group-sues-distrokid-over-ai-slop-flooding-streaming/)\n\n[The Trump administration wants equity in AI companies and every founder just got a co-investor they never pitched](https://startupfortune.com/the-trump-administration-wants-equity-in-ai-companies-and-every-founder-just-got-a-co-investor-they-never-pitched/)\n\nThe Trump administration is weighing government equity stakes in America's top AI companies, with models ranging from a passive 9.9% Intel-style position to Bernie Sanders' 50% sovereign wealth fund proposal. Mike Bloomberg called the idea Orwellian on July 20. For AI founders, every version of this deal lands differently on a cap table. - [government equity stake in AI companies](https://startupfortune.com/the-trump-administration-wants-equity-in-ai-companies-and-every-founder-just-got-a-co-investor-they-never-pitched/) - [federal ownership of AI startups explained](https://startupfortune.com/the-trump-administration-wants-equity-in-ai-companies-and-every-founder-just-got-a-co-investor-they-never-pitched/)\n\n*This article is posted in [AI News](https://startupfortune.com/category/ai/), check it out for more related stories.*\n\n## Join the discussion\n\n[Open in the community →](https://startupfortune.com/community/)\n\nAlmost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails/", "published_at": "2026-09-16 00:06:29+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-16 00:08:40.638575+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-safety", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Bernie Sanders", "Steve Bannon", "Future of Life Institute", "Pro-Human AI Declaration", "Richard Blumenthal", "Chip Roy", "Greg Casar", "Congress"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bernie-sanders-and-steve-bannon-share-a-stage-to-demand-ai-guardrails.jsonld"}}