Sanders and Bannon to Speak at 'Pro-Human' AI Safety Gathering

Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist, are scheduled to speak on September 15 at the 'Pro-Human Assembly,' an event organized by the Future of Life Institute (FLI). The gathering focuses on slowing the pace of AI development and ensuring humans retain control over rapidly advancing technology.

The event follows the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee, who announced last week on X that he left Anthropic over safety concerns, accusing both companies of 'racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.' Axios reported that Coxon would deliver remarks at the assembly, but an FLI spokesperson told Gizmodo he will not attend.

Over the weekend, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that frontier AI labs should collaborate to slow development while ensuring Chinese competitors do not gain an edge. The essay was quickly endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, the recently departed CEO of Google DeepMind. Meanwhile, President Trump dismissed existential concerns and reiterated the accelerationist argument that if the U.S. does not build superintelligence first, China will.

Sanders has recently become one of Capitol Hill's most vocal critics of unconstrained AI development, calling for a sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI profits to taxpayers and proposing a full-scale ban on superintelligence. Bannon has described AI as 'the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind.'