Act This Week: A Call for Urgent Action on AI Safety and Accountability

Jerise, The window for action is closing rapidly. For too long, Congress has taken no action regarding the serious economic and environmental risks of Artificial Intelligence. Only when the stark, existential threat to human survival was impossible to ignore did national leaders begin to take notice. This summer, Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter directly to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. He reminded them that each had previously committed to pause development if their systems became too dangerous to safely control. He asked them to honor their own words: "In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster." The letter concluded: "If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will." Now that AI developers are expressing alarms about human extinction, Congress is finally starting to listen. Public hearings are happening and many bills are being drafted. But the pressure has to keep coming. That’s why we're asking you to write to your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators and tell them the AI race needs a pause, and the public-interest—the common good, not private profit—needs to be protected. The build-out of potentially AI-induced extinction-level technologies cannot be left to a handful of billionaires playing God with the future of humanity. Advanced technical safeguards—like requiring companies to retrain models to delete dangerous nuclear and biological knowledge, keeping agents off open networks, and installing kill switches—are of dire consequence and must be passed immediately. Congress needs to enact a moratorium on new data centers, ban “superintelligence” models and mandate third-party independent evaluators be embedded in all the tech companies. In addition, Congress cannot continue to disregard the human cost of an unregulated AI. They must not focus solely on existential threats while ignoring the immediate crises facing our workforce, our health care, our privacy, the natural resources of our local communities and the risk of cyber-attacks to our financial, transportation and medical systems. If Congress fails to act now, the unregulated expansion of AI will result in the loss of millions of jobs. Because our economic system relies heavily on employment-based insurance coverage, these job losses will directly cause a catastrophic loss of healthcare coverage for millions of families. And because Social Security and Medicare are funded by payroll tax, the security of our seniors is in jeopardy. Artificial Intelligence is the most powerful, transformative technology in human history. While it offers immense potential to accelerate economic growth and uncover medical and scientific breakthroughs, it presents unprecedented economic, environmental, technological, and existential risks. So far, Congress has done nothing to prepare for or mitigate these and many more impacts on our lives, our livelihoods and our communities. Let them know that is unacceptable. Our economy, our environment, and our democracy depend on whether the public, we the people, have a say in what AI is for, what AI does, and what AI is never allowed to do. The Sanders Institute will expand on some of the issues raised in this email in the coming days. We’d be interested in your thoughts. Please join us in urging Congress to take action to protect our lives, our livelihoods and our communities. Thank you, Jane O’Meara Sanders The Sanders Institute DONATE NOW Paid for by the Sanders Institute 131 Church St., Burlington, VT 05401 The Sanders Institute is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization.   Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from The Sanders Institute, please click here.