Bernie Sanders urges international cooperation to curb AI’s ‘runaway train’

The US senator Bernie Sanders espoused the importance of international cooperation in regulating AI at a Wednesday panel on Capitol Hill alongside two leading Chinese scientists.

As startups and tech giants, most prominently in Silicon Valley and Beijing, race to advance and scale their artificial intelligence, Sanders has been among the AI skeptics advocating for safeguards.

During the discussion, Sanders raised concerns about potential implications stemming from widespread AI use including misinformation, loss of data privacy, and social isolation among adolescents who are dependent on chatbots.

The Vermont senator also voiced alarm about the existential risks automation may pose to American society, raising a possible surge in unemployment if companies favor automated labor over human workers. The researchers on the panel also presented the prospect of super-intelligent systems operating outside the bounds of its designers’ instructions.

“The richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes. They acknowledge that they don’t understand how it works, and they don’t know where it’s headed,” Sanders said, who suggested a doomsday future if safety measures are not implemented.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, called for an international treaty similar to the cold-war era nuclear pact.

“We need to cooperate. We need dialogue,” he said.

The optics of an event with Chinese academics – Xue Lan of Tsinghua University and Zeng Yi of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance – drew backlash from some conservatives, who did not appear to dispute the need for regulation, but who questioned the trustworthiness of the Chinese government.

“Senator Sanders’ concerns about AI are overstated, but I respect them. We should be asking questions about child safety, community impact, and economic displacement,” wrote Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the conservative thinktank the Hudson Institute, in a Monday X post. “What we shouldn’t do is partner with foreign adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party in those discussions.”

In another X post on Monday, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent touted an America-first agenda.