Bannon and Sanders Unite Against AI, Diverge on Fix
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist turned podcaster, do not agree on much. But on Tuesday, Sept. 15, they stood on the same Washington stage and delivered the same warning: artificial intelligence is advancing dangerously fast, and a handful of technology executives should not decide humanity’s future.
The rare pairing at the Pro-Human Assembly — an event organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute and built around its Pro-Human AI Declaration, which calls for keeping humans in control of AI — drew an ideologically mixed lineup that organizers described as evidence of genuine bipartisan alarm, according to Scripps News. It also placed Bannon at odds with President Donald Trump, who has dismissed warnings about AI as a hoax.
A Shared Diagnosis
“AI is advancing exponentially every single day,” Sanders told the crowd. “We are at a dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history and it is imperative for all of us to stand up to the owners of the industry, to stand up to a government and both political parties that have not been as aggressive in any way shape or form as they should be.”
Bannon, addressing the same audience, agreed the technology could be transformative but drew a hard line. “We think it could be a great technology, but we are not going to give these guys carte blanche,” he said.
The pairing reflects how thoroughly AI has scrambled traditional political alliances. Sanders, an independent and self-described democratic socialist, has spent roughly the past year warning that AI oligarchs are automating away American jobs. Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, has spent about as long telling his own audience that unregulated AI amounts to a handoff of national power to unaccountable tech executives.
Two Roads Forward
Where the two diverge is on the fix — and the gap is wide.
Sanders used his remarks to announce plans to introduce legislation with Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, or AI capable of outperforming humans across the board. “Like nuclear weapons, artificial superintelligence is a threat to humanity, and it must be treated as such,” Sanders said. He also called for binding international safety standards rather than voluntary industry commitments. “When you are racing toward a cliff, you do not just ease the gas pedal; you hit the brakes,” he said.
Bannon, by contrast, argued the fix should not wait on Congress at all. “This is not legislation; this has to be executive action,” he said, framing his preferred approach as pressuring Trump to act unilaterally while America “quarantines” China. He called for cutting Beijing out of the AI ecosystem, suggesting the government bar Chinese nationals from U.S. AI labs and Chinese students from technical programs. “They stood up to the Soviet Union, and the first thing in standing up to them was to choke them off,” he said. “And that is what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Sanders took the opposite lesson from the Cold War, urging Trump to negotiate an AI treaty with Chinese President Xi Jinping at their upcoming meeting. He pointed to the arms-control agreements that former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed despite deep distrust.
Attacking the Oligarchs
If the prescriptions differed, the villains did not. Both men trained their fire on the small group of executives steering frontier AI development — and on the timing of their newfound caution.
Bannon accused AI companies and the executives calling for safeguards of using the crisis to entrench their market position. “All they are trying to do is use a crisis and turn it to their advantage by creating a moat, a cartel,” he said, arguing that the companies want to “socialize all the risk” while keeping the financial upside. He called their stated concern “a bold-faced lie” and “this phony, oh we really should have controls.”
That remark is Bannon’s allegation, not an established finding, and IBTimes UK framed it as such. In the same breath, Bannon warned that ordinary taxpayers would carry the cost: “People making $52,000 a year are going to underwrite the oligarchs.”
Sanders struck a similar chord. “Virtually all of the decisions regarding the development of AI have been made by a handful of the richest people in the world,” he said, “whose chief goal is to achieve even more wealth and more power than they already have, no matter what the impact their work has on ordinary people.” His proposed remedy is legislation ensuring that AI’s gains “benefit workers not just wealthy owners of Big Tech.”
The Break With Trump
The assembly’s most striking feature was its collision with the White House. Trump has rejected AI-risk warnings as a “HOAX” and champions rapid development as a race the United States must win against China. “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!” he wrote on Truth Social, as USA Today reported. Trump also singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, saying he was “pretending to be a perfect little angel.”
That puts Bannon in an awkward position: the executive action he wants would have to come from a president who has called the underlying warnings a hoax. Sanders slammed Congress as “asleep at the wheel” and called Trump “embarrassing” for dismissing the alarms.
The event followed a wave of AI-safety news. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted on X that the industry is “gambling with our lives,” estimating roughly a 10% chance of a dystopian outcome in the next decade. As TIME reported, Coxon’s posts drew 153 million views within 36 hours. Business Insider later detailed his disagreements with Anthropic’s leadership.
Shortly after the post went viral, Amodei published a Sept. 12 essay warning that misaligned AIs could take over the internet within 6 to 12 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly backed slowing frontier development, though neither committed to an immediate halt.
A Diplomatic Test Ahead
The debate now moves to the international stage. Trump and Xi are set to meet Sept. 24 in Washington, with AI safety expected on the agenda, followed by a state dinner.
Neither side has shown much appetite for a deal. Beijing dismissed the U.S. slowdown push as “fearmongering” and “malicious competition,” as NBC News reported — effectively siding with Trump against the U.S. executives calling for a pause. The state-run Global Times went further, calling Amodei’s proposal “packed with containment provisions targeting China” and, in essence, “a Cold War playbook.”
Bannon, for one, saw the day in grander terms. “I do not think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right,” he said. “This is a hinge in history.”
Whether it proves to be one may depend less on the unlikely alliance that formed on that Washington stage than on two presidents, a divided Congress, and a technology neither side has shown it can slow down.