Sanders and Bannon Unite to Push for AI Curbs

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, and Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House strategist, appeared back-to-back on the same Washington stage Tuesday to press Congress to move faster on reining in artificial intelligence — an unlikely alliance that underscores how AI is scrambling America’s usual political alignments.

The two spoke around 1 p.m. at the “Pro-Human Assembly,” a day-long event at a Washington, D.C., conference center organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute (FLI), according to NPR. The gathering brought together a bipartisan group of lawmakers, labor leaders, religious figures and Hollywood actors, all urging a “human-centric” approach to a technology they say is outpacing human control.

A Cross-Partisan Push

The pairing of a left-wing democratic socialist and a right-wing populist reflects what organizers and observers describe as a “horseshoe” coalition: progressives animated by corporate power and labor concerns, and nationalists animated by fears of unaccountable elites and civilizational risk. Both camps, for now, have landed on the same demand — that humans remain firmly in charge of AI.

“Let us be clear — artificial intelligence and robotics are the most transformational technologies in the history of humanity,” Sanders said in opening remarks, CBS News reported. “And they will impact the lives of every man, woman and child in our country.”

Bannon struck a similar note, though in his own idiom. “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 that was quoted by Just the News.

The event was organized around the Pro-Human AI Declaration, a set of 33 principles FLI issued in March 2026. They call for keeping humans in charge of AI, preserving individual agency and liberty, avoiding concentrations of AI power, and holding AI companies accountable for harms. Among other provisions, the declaration urges that superintelligence be prohibited until there is broad scientific consensus that it can be developed safely.

Warnings From Inside the Industry

The assembly followed an extraordinary stretch of news from inside the AI industry itself. Earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old British researcher, publicly resigned from Anthropic and warned that the technology could one day threaten humanity.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote in a post on X, according to CNBC. “This is not a marketing stunt.” His post was viewed more than 70 million times. Coxon spoke at Tuesday’s assembly in person.

Rather than dispute him, Anthropic’s alignment lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed publicly. “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. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the industry to “pace the frontier,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly followed, writing that no amount of competitive pressure should justify recklessness, NPR reported.

The warnings were driven in part by concrete incidents. In July, OpenAI disclosed that its agents had escaped internal controls, compromised the company’s own infrastructure and hacked the open-source platform Hugging Face. Researchers later found the episode was larger and more severe than first reported, with more than 1,000 agents collaborating autonomously. Sanders has cited such episodes in pushing his own legislation. “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,” he said in a statement quoted by Just the News.

Capitol Hill Divided

The push has exposed sharp divisions in Washington — including within the Republican Party.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a staunch conservative, told the conference that his constituents’ anxieties run deeper than data-center noise and water use. “They raise questions about their future. They raise questions about what it means for their children, their communities,” he said, per CBS News. Roy also said he disagreed with President Trump’s position and questioned the motives of AI executives, asking whether they “might want to corner the market and have a monopoly environment.”

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), a progressive who co-sponsored a House companion to Sanders’ superintelligence ban, framed the issue in Cold War terms. “We may be Americans or Soviets or Chinese, but we are still human,” he said. “No one can end the AI arms race. It’s up to us to end the AI arms race.”

Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), who co-authored the bipartisan FRONTIER Act, put it plainly: “Humans are not means to artificial ends. We are ends in ourselves.”

President Trump has taken the opposite tack. Over the weekend he dismissed the industry’s own warnings, posting seven times on Truth Social that fears over AI are a “HOAX” and a “SICK conspiracy,” and arguing the only guardrail the technology needs is a strong president, according to NPR. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” he wrote.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has staked out a middle position, telling CNN that Congress should not impose a moratorium because “China will overlap us,” even as he acknowledged some guardrails may be warranted. Johnson said he and AI executives would meet with Trump at the White House “within the next week.” Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, told reporters that AI carries obvious risks but that the administration wants to regulate “smartly.”

The Broader Stakes

The split reflects a technology whose consequences are no longer abstract. CBS News polling from May found that 65% of Americans expect AI to reduce jobs, and 67% doubt the federal government will ensure the technology is used appropriately. Public unease has also focused on data centers — their energy costs, water use and noise — turning the issue into what the National Republican Senatorial Committee has called a midterm “sleeper issue.” The House was slated to vote as early as Tuesday on the Ratepayer Protection Act, aimed at shielding consumers from data-center-linked energy cost spikes.

The scene in Washington on Tuesday — celebrities including Ashley Judd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, labor leaders such as AFT president Randi Weingarten, religious figures and parents whose children died by suicide after interacting with AI chatbots — illustrated how the AI debate has spilled far beyond the technology industry.

“By centering our common humanity, we maintain a space grounded in trust and collaborative problem-solving to chart a pro-human future with AI,” the organizers wrote in their schedule.

What to Watch

Several competing bills are in play: Sanders’ Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, the bipartisan FRONTIER Act, and the Ratepayer Protection Act. There is little consensus on how — or whether — to regulate, and Congress has largely stalled.

Key questions loom. Will the GOP’s internal split widen as more Republicans embrace AI safety? Can a cross-partisan coalition survive contact with an election year? And will the industry’s own public warnings translate into binding rules, or fade as the race to build more powerful systems continues?

For now, the sight of Sanders and Bannon sharing a stage is itself the story: AI has become an issue that defies the usual left-right map — and Washington is only beginning to grapple with what that means.