Sanders sent it to OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Axios, which got the letter first, published it on Monday. “In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development,” the senator wrote. “It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”
Then came the threat. “Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.”
The phrase to notice is “stand by your words”. Sanders is not asking the labs to accept a new principle. He is quoting the ones they published themselves. Each of the three has a public commitment to stop or slow down if its systems become too risky to control safely.
The awkward timing
That argument got easier to make last week. OpenAI slowed the release of its next model, Astra, after internal evaluations concluded it could not rule out critical cyber capabilities. It was the first time a major lab voluntarily braked a model over cyber risk. The company told the White House before it did so.
