Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon unite at Pro-Human Assembly to demand AI guardrails

As President Donald Trump continues to push the development of Artificial Intelligence, a group of strange bedfellows is gathering in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to advocate for reining in AI development they call reckless. The group includes socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, conservative commentator Steve Bannon, GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and teachers union President Randi Weingarten. 

Sanders will speak alongside Bannon at Tuesday’s Pro-Human Assembly, a conference organized by The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit group that earlier this year issued The Pro-Human AI Declaration, calling for keeping humans firmly in control of AI technology and development, avoiding concentrations of AI power in the hands of large firms, and holding the companies accountable for abuses of the new tools. 

“The Oligarchs are finally being forced to admit they've lied from the beginning about the dangers of acceleration with zero guardrails — they've put the nation and mankind in jeopardy,” Bannon said in a statement to Axios, which first reported on the conference. 

AI's lack of human control worries lawmakers and AI companies alike

The conference comes as the leaders of the country’s major AI companies sounded the alarm over the weekend about the rapid pace of AI development and called for a slowdown. Recent incidents related to certain AI models operating independently of human control have also worried lawmakers across the political spectrum, some of whom are calling for greater regulation or at least caution. 

The warning followed the high-profile resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who has raised concerns about what he thinks is the company prioritizing “endgame” development of self-improving AI. The 27-year-old British citizen is warning this trajectory could lead to an “out of control” AI that could present survival risks for humanity. 

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon, who is slated to speak at the Pro-Human Assembly, wrote in a social media post last week. 

Instead of disputing the claims, Anthropic’s top scientist, Evan Hubinger, agreed wholeheartedly with Coxon. “Jacob is correct here – we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote in a post to X. 

In a post to his blog, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of AI development. “But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capability advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. 

"American competitive pressure" does not justify "recklessness," Sam Altman says

Other AI leaders joined Amodei’s calls for caution. “We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X. “No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”

Google DeepMind’s chief and Elon Musk, the owner of xAI, both agreed that a slowdown of advanced AI development could be warranted. 

Sanders has become the progressive champion of reining in AI companies and their technologies. While he has long warned of AI’s threat to jobs, the senator has recently shifted his criticism to focus on AI safety after a string of incidents this year. In August, for example, OpenAI agents “circumvented controls” that isolated them from the internet and compromised the company’s own “internal infrastructure” and hacked another AI company, Hugging Face’s systems. 

The incident prompted Sanders to introduce legislation to ban artificial “superintelligence,” or machines that do not rely on human control for improvement and operation. “Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said in a statement. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control.”  

Rep. Greg Casar, D-Tex., sponsored the legislation in the House of Representatives. Casar is also slated to speak at The Pro-Human Assembly on Tuesday. 

President Trump, however, has pushed back against calls for more AI guardrails. He argues that existing criminal and regulatory federal powers are sufficient to address potential abuses. 

Trump: "A sick conspiracy"

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ - and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday. 

“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! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” the president added. 

The conference is bringing together politicians, religious leaders, and union representatives from across the political spectrum. 

Sanders and Bannon will speak back-to-back around 1:00 PM. Congressman Casar, D- Tex., and Rep. Chip Roy, R.-Tex., will speak earlier on Tuesday morning. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten will speak alongside other union leaders from SAG-AFTRA and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. Religious leaders are also set to join the conference, including Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Cordileone and President of the National Association of Evangelicals Walter Kim. 

In March, The Pro-Human Assembly released The Pro-Human AI Declaration, centered on the idea that “artificial intelligence should serve humanity, not the reverse.” The declaration calls for keeping human control of AI tools at the center of future development, preserving human agency, and preventing a concentration of power or AI monopolies. 

“As companies race to develop and deploy AI systems, humanity faces a fork in the road. One path is a race to replace: humans replaced as creators, counselors, caregivers and companions, then in most jobs and decision-making roles, concentrating ever more power in unaccountable institutions and their machines,” reads the declaration’s preamble. “An influential fringe even advocates altering or replacing humanity itself. This race to replace poses risks to societal stability, national security, economic prosperity, civil liberties, privacy, and democratic governance. It also imperils the human experiences of childhood and family, faith, and community.”