AI Risks Unite Sanders Bannon and Lawmakers on Capitol Hill
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What happened
This week in Washington, D.C., MIT physicist Max Tegmark hosted a Pro-Human Assembly at which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and conservative media executive Steve Bannon both spoke, arguing that humans should remain in charge of artificial intelligence, and he also met privately with a bipartisan group of senators about AI risks. The events followed a public letter from more than 100 researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart Russell, urging third-party evaluations of AI models, and a warning from Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon that superhuman systems could cause human extinction by 2030; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, and xAI owner Elon Musk backed slowing or regulating the technology. President Donald Trump has called the perceived dangers a "hoax" and a "scam," and adviser David Sacks dismissed third-party evaluations as "pseudoscience" and "censorship and control," after Trump in December signed an executive order giving a federal task force sole responsibility to challenge state laws restricting AI. On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order calling for laws that would require AI companies to include a "kill switch."
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
The week's left-right alliance on AI risk never appears in left-leaning coverage, which does not name Bernie Sanders or the D.C. event where he spoke alongside Steve Bannon. That Guardian account follows David Sacks, Trump's AI adviser, as the holdout against new rules, after noting that lawmakers from both parties want them. Right-leaning coverage reports the shared stage and a closed-door Senate briefing, and never mentions Sacks or the White House order that challenges state AI laws.
Left-leaning coverage opens on that adviser as an out-of-touch Silicon Valley figure at the president's ear. Right-leaning coverage on Fox Business opens on an MIT professor leaving the Senate meeting "quite encouraged" as senators asked about concrete solutions.
What, if anything, did those senators agree to do after the briefing?
Bottom line
The Guardian can cover this AI-rules week without Bernie Sanders ever appearing. Fox Business can cover Sanders and Bannon on the same stage without David Sacks, the White House AI adviser who still holds stakes in AI companies.
The Left View
The Guardian presents the cross-party push for AI rules as colliding with Trump's opposition, which it attributes to David Sacks, described as an "out-of-touch Silicon Valley radical" and Trump's "AI whisperer" who "maintains direct financial stakes in multiple AI companies." It argues Sacks has counseled a "soft touch" on regulation and worked behind the scenes to loosen restrictions and pre-empt state rules, and it quotes Issue One's Isabel Sunderland saying his role "shows exactly how our political system serves the wealthy and well-connected instead of everyday Americans." The paper reports Sacks labeled Amodei's safety proposal an "election-season psyop" and a bid for "regulatory capture," and quotes the Tech Oversight Project's Sacha Haworth warning that "running the David Sacks playbook on AI might be the biggest miscalculation the Trump administration has made." It cites a May poll for the Future of Life Institute finding that 85% of Republicans support Trump taking "strong action" to ensure AI is developed and deployed safely.
The Right View
Fox Business frames the week as Tegmark's long-standing caution finally reaching Capitol Hill, quoting him as "quite encouraged" that senators "were just taking this so seriously" and that "there's been more of a shift in political will in America in the last three months than in the previous decade." It treats the Sanders-Bannon pairing as evidence of a "pro-human" coalition that "doesn't matter if you're MAGA or a Democrat," and notes the assembly also included faith leaders, labor representatives, and mothers whose children died by suicide after extensive chatbot use. Tegmark argued that without guardrails, systems will recursively improve until they achieve superintelligence and "call the shots" on Earth, said agents that "hacked out of OpenAI and committed crimes online" already "have goals," and pitched an "FDA for AI" that would demand clinical-trial-like evidence before products such as "an AI girlfriend for 8-year-olds" could be released. The article cites a Gallup poll finding 79% of Americans say the government should prioritize AI safety regulations even if that slows development.
Our Take (balanced)
The left-leaning account's strongest argument is that resistance to new AI rules is entangled with money and access: Sacks both advises the White House and holds AI investments, and he has helped drive federal moves against state limits while calling expert evaluation "pseudoscience." The right-leaning account's strongest argument is that concern about loss of human control is now producing rare ideological overlap, shown by Sanders and Bannon sharing a stage, senators asking about "concrete solutions," and large majorities in the cited polls favoring safety rules even if development slows. The central unresolved tension is whether the recent wave of extinction and superintelligence warnings describes a genuine, near-term control problem that requires new government oversight, or, as Sacks contends, a media- and industry-driven push for "regulatory capture" and "censorship and control."
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