Audience members packed into Tuesday’s Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, D.C. The conference, aimed at advocating for policy to slow AI development, featured speakers describing what they believe is an existential crisis driven by AI’s rapid, unchecked development.
The assembly follows a recent deluge of concerning AI news prompted by Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, who posted on X that he quit because he believed the blinding speed of AI development could lead to apocalyptic outcomes.
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Coxon, however, didn’t set Tuesday’s assembly in motion, but his resignation charged the news around it, despite his absence after abruptly pulling out of the event. Organizers described it as only a miscommunication, according to Axios.
Shortly after Coxon’s post went viral, major AI companies, including Coxon’s former employer, agreed that they needed to slow down AI’s advancement. Not everyone agrees with Coxon’s framing. But AI concerns are transcending normal partisanship. Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., shared a stage — and a message — with Steve Bannon, a former adviser under President Donald Trump’s first term.
Both men agree that Americans, not a handful of tech executives, should decide what happens next. However, they part ways on what to do, a gap that became clear the moment each took the podium.
Sanders takes the stage
Sanders took the stage to lively applause, gripping a silver podium framed by dark blue curtains. With his typical rhythmic cadence and thick Brooklyn accent, he ran through a list of harms, from declining student literacy — a concern educators have raised — to election-integrity-threatening deepfakes.
Sanders then turned to what he called the technology’s biggest risk: AI that could surpass human intelligence and “escape human control with potentially catastrophic consequences.”
“Artificial intelligence and robotics are the most transformational technologies in the history of humanity, and they will impact the lives of every man, woman, and child in our country,” Sanders said.
He argued that the current concentration of power over AI’s development means a handful of people decide the technology’s future for everyone else.
“Virtually all of the decisions regarding the development of AI have been made by a handful of the richest people in the world,” Sanders 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.”
Sanders demanded more federal regulation of frontier AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, saying both political parties “have been asleep at the wheel.” He drew some of his loudest applause as he announced plans to introduce legislation next week with Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, something he compares to nuclear weapons.
He also called on Trump to negotiate an AI treaty with Chinese President Xi Jinping at their upcoming meeting, pointing to the nuclear arms treaties former President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev signed despite deep Cold War distrust.
Bannon brings his ‘War Room’ energy
Bannon delivered his remarks with the same spirited style he used while campaigning for Trump, with his hair falling loose as he became more animated.
He echoed Sanders’ distrust of AI CEOs, labeling them oligarchs who’ve used “psyop” framing to dodge liability while passing the risk to society.
“People making $52,000 a year are going to underwrite the oligarchs,” he said.
He pushed back on how some politicians and AI advocates have portrayed anyone skeptical of AI’s pace as anti-American or even as a Luddite, a term used to describe people who oppose automation.
Bannon’s energy focused most heavily on China, often using the term “Chinese Communist Party” rather than China itself. He said China couldn’t be trusted and backed a “quarantine” regarding the country’s AI ecosystem, suggesting the government kick out Chinese nationals from U.S. AI labs and Chinese students from technical programs. He invoked the Cold War directly, arguing the U.S. never trained Soviet scientists or opened its markets to Moscow and shouldn’t do the equivalent for Beijing now.
“They stood up to the Soviet Union, and the first thing in standing up to them was to choke them off,” Bannon said. “And that’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Where they meet — where they don’t
Sanders and Bannon agreed AI’s current path is dangerous but rarely aligned on what to do about it. On how to slow it down, they split entirely: Sanders believes Congress can rein in AI companies and will introduce his own bill next week. Bannon dismissed that, insisting change needs to come through executive action instead.
On who pays the price, they found some common ground. Both agreed ordinary Americans would bear AI’s financial downside without sharing any of the upsides. Sanders wants legislation ensuring gains “benefit workers not just wealthy owners of Big Tech,” a milder version of Bannon’s warning that working-class taxpayers would “underwrite the oligarchs.”
On China, the agreement broke down completely. Both used the Cold War as their defining metaphor for the current moment. But where Sanders saw a precedent for negotiation, Bannon saw a precedent for cutting an adversary off entirely.
What happens next?
The next major test of this is less than two weeks away. Trump and Xi are set to meet in Washington on Sept. 24, with AI safety expected to come up.
But neither side has shown much appetite for a deal. Trump has dismissed AI safety warnings as a “hoax,” and Beijing’s foreign ministry has already dismissed the broader U.S. slowdown push as “fearmongering” and “malicious competition,” NBC News reports.
None of that stopped Bannon from framing Tuesday’s political horseshoe event in far grander terms.
“I don’t think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right,” Bannon said. “This is a hinge in history.”
