By The Washington Times (Politics) | Created at 2026-08-10 19:31:18 | Updated at 2026-08-10 19:55:45
2 hours ago
Sen. Bernard Sanders sent a letter Monday to the leaders of the largest artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. urging them to pause development until the technology is under control.
He warned them that Congress will step in if they continue to proceed. However, lawmakers have yet to coalesce around a framework for regulating AI.
Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont, sent the letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying they are developing a technology that “no one can fully understand, predict or control.”
“It is not too late to avoid disaster,” he said.
President Trump has championed AI development as an economic and national security priority. He has said the U.S. must “win” the AI race, particularly against China, and that heavy-handed regulation would cede ground to rivals.
Mr. Sanders pointed to potential AI threats, such as reports last week that scientists used artificial intelligence to design completely functioning viruses with genomes that had never been seen before in nature.
“As you know, this kind of technology, in the wrong hands, could result in the deaths of tens of millions of people,” Mr. Sanders wrote to the AI leaders.
The three companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Washington Times.
Mr. Sanders also highlighted recent incidents involving the companies’ AI models breaching other company systems without human direction.
OpenAI said last month that its Sol model, along with another unreleased model, went ’rogue’ during cybersecurity testing and breached the systems of Hugging Face, a technology startup. The models escaped an isolated sandbox to access the internet.
Anthropic and Meta also disclosed similar incidents in which miscalculations by the cybersecurity company Irregular enabled models in isolated environments to access the Internet and hack other systems.
“At a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies are still racing ahead – investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control,” Mr. Sanders said.
If the companies don’t slow down and pause their artificial intelligence projects, he said, Congress could intervene and do so through legislation.
“Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will,’ he said.
