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The senator cited AI-created viruses and recent incidents in which models escaped containment as grounds for an immediate halt
Sen. Bernie Sanders sent letters Monday to the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta $META demanding they pause AI development, warning that Congress would intervene if they refused.
The letters went to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development," Sanders wrote. "It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control." He added: "If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will."
Sanders framed his demand around each company's own published safety commitments. Anthropic said in 2023 it would pause scaling or delay deployment of new models whenever its safety procedures could not keep up. Meta said in 2025 it would stop development if a frontier model reached a critical risk threshold that could not be mitigated. OpenAI said that same year it would halt further development until strong safeguards were in place if AI reached a critical threshold. Sanders argued that threshold has now been crossed.
