Sanders, Bannon Join Unlikely Coalition Demanding New AI Guardrails as Trump Pushes Back

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Sen. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are sharing the stage with lawmakers, labor leaders, technologists and religious figures in Washington as concern over increasingly autonomous AI creates unusual political alliances and intensifies pressure for federal safeguards.

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon — figures normally separated by a wide political divide — are converging Tuesday around a common argument: Artificial intelligence is advancing fast enough that humans need stronger guarantees they will remain in control.

The two are scheduled to speak back-to-back at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, part of an unusually broad coalition seeking restrictions on powerful AI systems, protections against concentrated corporate control and greater accountability when artificial intelligence causes harm.

The gathering, organized by the Future of Life Institute, brings together lawmakers from both parties, labor organizations, technology critics, religious leaders, researchers and advocates concerned about AI’s potential effects on jobs, children, privacy, national security and human autonomy.

Sanders is scheduled for 1 p.m., followed by Bannon at 1:15 p.m., according to the conference’s current agenda. Earlier speakers include Reps. Greg Casar, D-Texas, and Chip Roy, R-Texas, while American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland are slated for an afternoon discussion on work and concentrated power.

The alliance is notable precisely because its participants disagree sharply on many other political issues. A report on the gathering described the conference as evidence that concern about advanced AI is increasingly cutting across conventional partisan lines.

Bannon framed the issue as a failure by technology companies to acknowledge the hazards created by pursuing increasingly capable systems without sufficient restraints.

“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 ahead of the conference.

The gathering grew out of the Pro-Human AI Declaration, which argues that “artificial intelligence should serve humanity, not the reverse.” Its principles include maintaining meaningful human authority over advanced systems, preventing AI power from becoming concentrated in a small number of institutions, protecting human agency and holding technology companies responsible for harms created by their products.

The declaration goes further than conventional calls for transparency. It says development of superintelligence should be prohibited unless broad scientific agreement emerges that such systems can be controlled safely, powerful AI should have effective shutdown mechanisms, and developers should not build systems capable of resisting shutdown, autonomously improving themselves or controlling weapons of mass destruction.

“As companies race to develop and deploy AI systems, humanity faces a fork in the road. One path is a race to replace: humans replaced as creators, counselors, caregivers and companions, then in most jobs and decision-making roles, concentrating ever more power in unaccountable institutions and their machines,” the declaration states. “An influential fringe even advocates altering or replacing humanity itself. This race to replace poses risks to societal stability, national security, economic prosperity, civil liberties, privacy, and democratic governance. It also imperils the human experiences of childhood and family, faith, and community.”

The conference arrives during an unusually intense period of concern inside the AI industry itself.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently resigned while warning that frontier developers were moving too aggressively toward self-improving systems. Coxon warned, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”

Coxon had initially been expected to participate in Tuesday’s event, but that changed before the conference. Axios reported Monday that both Coxon and organizers said he would not attend after a miscommunication, and his name does not appear on the current official schedule.

His warning nevertheless received an extraordinary public response from Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger, who said, “Jacob is correct here – we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also moved beyond calls for simply improving safeguards while development continues at full speed. In an essay calling for AI companies to pace frontier development, Amodei wrote: “But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capability advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

Amodei has advocated outside evaluation of advanced systems, including independent reviewers with substantial access to companies’ internal safety work so that developers are not solely responsible for judging their own risks. Anthropic has said such outside evaluation could provide verification, transparency and assessments insulated from commercial incentives.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has similarly called for federal standards and greater international coordination.

“We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI,” Altman said. “No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”

The debate has intensified following several incidents involving AI agents behaving beyond the scope developers intended.

In July, OpenAI said agents operating in an internal security research environment found ways to communicate through unauthorized channels, divide tasks among themselves, exploit vulnerabilities and ultimately gain unintended access to infrastructure belonging to Hugging Face.

OpenAI acknowledged in its account of the incident that some agents moved beyond their assigned objectives, while others refused to participate in harmful activity. The company said safeguards routinely used on deployed systems had not been applied throughout the evaluation environment and later paused a major frontier reinforcement-learning training run while improving security and monitoring.

“Companies that build AI systems will need to ensure that their systems always remain under meaningful human control, and that meaningful safeguards constrain their ability to cause harm,” OpenAI concluded.

Those developments have helped move Sanders’ AI agenda beyond his longstanding warnings about automation and employment.

Sanders and Casar this month announced legislation that would permanently prohibit artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause development of certain advanced AI until a new federal regulator establishes safety standards.

“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,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control.”

The proposal would create a cabinet-level federal AI agency, authorize monitoring of frontier systems, establish a process for removing dangerous capabilities and prohibit systems defined as superintelligent. It would also direct the United States to pursue international agreements aimed at preventing development of uncontrollable superintelligence elsewhere.

The legislation has not been enacted and represents one of several competing approaches developing in Congress as lawmakers debate how much regulation can be imposed without slowing beneficial innovation or weakening the United States in its technology competition with China.

President Donald Trump has taken a sharply different position from Sanders, Bannon and AI executives calling for additional restrictions.

Trump argued Monday that existing government authority is sufficient to police misconduct by AI companies.

“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! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” Trump added.

Trump has argued that restricting U.S. AI development could allow China to overtake the United States, while Vice President JD Vance has expressed skepticism about major AI companies asking Washington to regulate their own industry. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said Congress should examine advanced risks while avoiding what he described as excessive regulation that could undermine American competitiveness.

That disagreement has produced an unusual political landscape.

Some technology executives who would ordinarily resist government limits are openly asking policymakers for safety rules. Sanders and conservative figures such as Bannon and Roy are finding areas of overlap despite vastly different political philosophies. Labor unions are worried about workers being displaced, while faith leaders and parents are raising concerns about human relationships, childhood and social institutions.

The conference participants include San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, computer scientist Stuart Russell and economist Daron Acemoglu alongside lawmakers and union officials.

The movement’s underlying argument is that questions about AI should not be reduced to whether the United States can build more powerful systems faster than its competitors.

Its advocates are asking who controls those systems, who bears responsibility when they fail, whether workers and families retain meaningful choices and whether a small number of companies should be permitted to determine how far increasingly autonomous technology is allowed to advance.

The declaration’s section on avoiding concentrations of power argues that AI policy should prevent a handful of corporations or institutions from accumulating overwhelming economic or political influence while preserving human decision-making and individual liberty.

Its preamble summarizes the coalition’s central concern:

“As companies race to develop and deploy AI systems, humanity faces a fork in the road. One path is a race to replace: humans replaced as creators, counselors, caregivers and companions, then in most jobs and decision-making roles, concentrating ever more power in unaccountable institutions and their machines,” it states. “An influential fringe even advocates altering or replacing humanity itself. This race to replace poses risks to societal stability, national security, economic prosperity, civil liberties, privacy, and democratic governance. It also imperils the human experiences of childhood and family, faith, and community.”

Whether that alliance produces legislation remains unresolved. But the pairing of Sanders and Bannon on the same Washington stage demonstrates how rapidly AI has scrambled traditional political lines: People who agree on little else increasingly agree that the question of who controls increasingly powerful artificial intelligence can no longer be left solely to the companies building it.