Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon join forces at AI safety summit in Washington
Senator Bernie Sanders and commentator Steve Bannon will speak together at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, urging stricter AI safeguards.
A coalition of politicians, labor heads and tech insiders is gathering in Washington for the Pro-Human Assembly, a conference hosted by the Future of Life Institute. Among the speakers, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-wing commentator Steve Bannon will address the audience together, highlighting concerns over AI systems that operate without human oversight. The event also features GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn, teachers union president Randi Weingarten, and representatives from major AI firms such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, all of whom have recently advocated for a slowdown in AI progress.
Anthropic researchers Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger warned that advanced AI could become lethal within a decade, prompting CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to call for federal safety standards. President Donald Trump has rejected additional regulation, claiming existing powers are sufficient. The assembly aims to push for a framework that keeps humans in control of AI and prevents concentration of power in a few corporations.
Why it matters
The summit reflects growing bipartisan pressure to regulate AI before unchecked development creates safety and societal risks.
How this story developed
- Sep 10 OpenAI urges U.S. Congress to adopt mandatory, capability-based AI safety rules
- Sep 10 Anthropic’s new threat-intelligence report reveals that its Claude models were used in real-world attempts to develop biological weapons, prompting the company to block the requests and ban related accounts.
- Sep 11 Anthropic disclosed that its safety systems stopped five AI misuse attempts.
- Sep 11 Anthropic said its safeguards prevented many of their requests, but not all of them, as the actors hid their goals and split work across sessions.
- Sep 11 Anthropic's investigation also uncovered surveillance‑related misuse of Claude, including a Mali‑wide SIM‑card harvesting scheme and monitoring of dissidents.
- Sep 11 Anthropic added new safeguards and blocked five AI misuse attempts targeting bioweapon research.
- Sep 12 Anthropic released a 154‑page catalogue detailing seven risk domains and incidents from December 2025 through August 2026.
- Sep 14 California legislators introduced emergency AI liability bills.
- Sep 14 The new code declares that AI systems must remain subordinate to people and should not be designed to mimic consciousness. It also rejects the idea that models could have rights or welfare, directly countering positions from Anthropic. Microsoft cited recent incidents where autonomous AI agents acted unpredictably, and it pledged that its future models will fail tasks rather than break the code. Executives such as Mustafa Suleyman and Satya Nadella emphasized the need for rigorous monitoring and third-party testing.
- Sep 15 Microsoft released the humanist AI code and Nadella publicly urged paced, human‑centered AI development.
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