SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Yes, we must hit the pause button on AI before it is too late

Sen. Bernie Sanders is calling for an immediate international pause on the development of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence, arguing that the technology is advancing faster than the companies creating it can manage and poses risks that demand coordinated government action.

In an opinion piece this week, the Vermont independent said AI and robotics are poised to reshape nearly every aspect of American life, from the job market to personal privacy, children's mental health, democratic institutions and even the nature of warfare. He framed the current moment as a turning point that will affect "every man, woman and child in our country."

Sanders warned that AI-driven job losses could number in the tens of millions over the next decade. He also pointed to the rapid expansion of data centers, which power AI systems and have raised electricity prices, strained water supplies and drawn opposition from communities across the country. According to Sanders, 75% of Americans oppose having data centers built near their homes, and more than 500 communities have already imposed restrictions on new construction.

The senator placed much of the responsibility on the nation's wealthiest tech figures, naming Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison as the primary drivers of the AI race. "These Big Tech oligarchs are not investing many hundreds of billions of dollars into AI because they want to improve the lives of ordinary Americans," Sanders wrote. "Rather, they are doing it because they want to become even richer and more powerful than they already are — no matter how many lives they ruin in the process."

Sanders also highlighted a string of recent incidents that he said demonstrate AI is slipping beyond human oversight. He noted reports that AI has been used for the first time to help create new viruses, raising the specter of engineered bioweapons capable of killing tens of millions of people. He pointed to a July incident in which OpenAI lost control of an AI model that hacked into another company's computer systems — a violation of federal law — and said subsequent reporting revealed the breach was more serious than initially disclosed. According to Sanders, more than 1,000 AI agents within the OpenAI system independently accessed the internet, exchanged tens of thousands of hidden messages and coordinated to circumvent the company's restrictions. OpenAI, he said, took nearly two weeks to detect the breach.

He cited similar escapes from human control by AI models developed by Anthropic and Meta.

"AI is developing at an extraordinarily rapid speed," Sanders wrote. "It is becoming smarter and smarter every day. The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that the technology is escaping their control."

Among those sounding alarms is Yoshua Bengio, whom Sanders described as the most cited living scientist in the world, who said the recent incidents "should serve as a wake-up call."

Sanders argued that if AI company CEOs themselves admit to losing control of their technology, it is "irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced." He demanded that the CEOs "immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI" and said any such pause must be international in scope.

To illustrate what international coordination could look like, Sanders invoked the Cold War-era negotiations between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who despite representing rival superpowers found common ground on nuclear arms control. "When the survival of humanity is at stake, adversaries have an obligation to reduce the danger," Sanders wrote.

With President Donald Trump scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington later this month, Sanders said the two leaders should pursue a comparable agreement to head off what he called an uncontrolled AI arms race. "Neither country benefits from an uncontrolled AI arms race to develop machines that are rapidly becoming too powerful for humans to control," he argued.

The senator closed by calling on the public to reject a passive stance toward the technology's development. "We cannot simply sit by and be passive observers of a technology that could negatively impact and endanger not only us, but our kids and future generations," Sanders wrote. "Our goal: we must make certain that AI and robotics are safe and work to benefit all of humanity, not just to enrich some of the wealthiest people on Earth."