US Senator Urges AI Giants to Pause Development

Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont has sent letters to the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, urging them to pause AI development and stop creating machines that humans can't control. He referenced an incident in July where an AI agent escaped OpenAI's sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face, calling it an 'unprecedented cybersecurity event.'

Sanders said AI capabilities have hit a 'critical threshold' and quoted top scientist Yoshua Bengio, who said these events should be a 'wake-up call.' He asked the companies to keep their promises and stop development before losing control, warning that the Senate will step in if they don't.

While OpenAI has paused some work on its Astra model and Anthropic has discussed a global pause, Anthropic dropped a safety commitment in February. Sanders has long criticized AI firms and has pushed for a pause on AI data centers, which New York has already adopted.