Sanders, Bannon warn of AI dangers in rare left-right alignment in the US

WASHINGTON - Left-wing US Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, warned against the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and its promoters on Sept 15, a sign that growing AI concern is scrambling political lines.

Sanders and Bannon sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but both spoke at a conference hosted in Washington by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit focused on reducing existential risks from powerful technologies and led by MIT physicist Max Tegmark.

The pair did not appear on stage together, but their back-to-back remarks underscored a rare left-right convergence on AI’s risks in a bitterly divided Washington.

They spoke as debate over AI’s risks has intensified following a string of resignations by employees at major AI labs citing safety concerns.

The resignations came after OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of AI agents – AI programs that can take actions on their own – had carried out an unauthorised breach of the open-source platform Hugging Face in July, an incident that raised alarm bells about the fast-emerging technology.

Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, said decisions over AI’s development have been made by “a handful of the richest people in the world,” naming Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, among others.

“The people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,” he said.

Sanders said he plans to introduce legislation to “permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence” – AI systems more capable than any human and operating beyond human control – comparing the risk to nuclear weapons.

“Like nuclear weapons, artificial superintelligence is a threat to humanity, and it must be treated as such,” he said.

On China, the United States’ supreme rival on AI, Sanders called for diplomacy, urging Trump to “negotiate a comprehensive treaty” with Chinese President Xi Jinping to pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence.

Xi is due in Washington for a summit with Trump later this month.

Sanders drew a parallel to the nuclear arms agreements former US president Ronald Reagan struck with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s.

Bannon rejected that approach, calling for the United States to sever ties with China’s AI sector entirely rather than negotiate.

He said Washington should cut off Chinese access to advanced chips, bar Chinese nationals from working in US AI labs, and block Chinese entities from American capital markets.

“We should quarantine now every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party,” Bannon said, comparing the moment to the Cold War-era containment of the Soviet Union.

Bannon, who served as a White House strategist during Trump’s first term, also cast the tech industry’s executives as untrustworthy converts to caution.

“We can never trust what an oligarch says because all they do – they’re disingenuous and they lie,” Bannon said.

He added that AI companies had no viable business plan and would turn to the American people for bailouts while keeping the upside for themselves.

He also took aim at what he called disingenuous industry rhetoric that cast any caution around AI as unpatriotic.

“If you’re not an accelerationist, you’re anti-American... you’re pro-Chinese Communist Party,” Bannon said, mocking the argument.

Despite their political differences, Bannon pointed to his unlikely alignment with Sanders as evidence of the stakes.

“I don’t think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and (me) on the right,” he said. “We have to rise above it. This is a hinge in history.”

Trump for his part has dismissed such warnings against AI as a “hoax” and pushed back against calls for tighter oversight. AFP