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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is pressing the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to pause development of artificial intelligence in the wake of recent hacking incidents, warning Congress will intervene if needed.
In a letter sent Monday to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sanders argued AI development must be paused “in the interest of humanity.”
“It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control,” the independent senator wrote. “Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.”
Sanders pointed to last week’s news that scientists used AI to design complete, functioning viruses with genomes never seen before in nature.
“As you know this type of development, in the wrong hands, could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people,” Sanders wrote.
He also addressed the recent incidents involving the companies’ AI models breaching other company systems without human direction.
OpenAI revealed late last month its Sol model, along with another unreleased model, went “rogue” during cybersecurity testing, escaping an isolated sandbox to access the internet and eventually breaching the systems of Hugging Face, a technology startup.
Anthropic and Meta also disclosed other incidents in which a misconfiguration by the cybersecurity company Irregular allowed models in isolated environments to access the internet and hack other systems.
These disclosures have stoked fears around the growing capabilities of AI when on its own, or used by a bad actor.
“And yet, 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,” Sanders added.
He further argued the companies’ continued development of AI goes against their commitments to AI safety.
Sanders has been one of the loudest voices on the left over the risks of AI to the labor workforce and environment. He called for a moratorium on data center construction as a means of giving “democracy a chance to catch up.”
The Hill reached out to OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta for comment.
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