{"id":585500,"date":"2026-08-15T12:44:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T12:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/585500\/"},"modified":"2026-08-15T12:44:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T12:44:17","slug":"bernie-sanders-ai-letter-a-bankrupt-appeal-to-the-oligarchs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/585500\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernie Sanders\u2019 AI letter: A bankrupt appeal to the oligarchs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) speaks during a campaign rally for Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Monday, July 20, 2026, in Minneapolis. [AP Photo\/Ellen Schmidt]<\/p>\n

On August 10, Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta demanding that they \u201cpause AI development\u201d and \u201cstop building machines that humans cannot control,\u201d promoting it with an accompanying video.<\/p>\n

The letter is characteristic of Sanders\u2019 politics. It is full of demagogy and empty rhetoric that educates no one about anything. It is calculated to stoke fear, while covering up every basic question the technology poses: Who owns it? Who controls it? In whose interests is it being developed?<\/p>\n

Sanders\u2019 first example of the supposed dangers of AI exemplifies his method. \u201cAI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses,\u201d he writes, warning that \u201cthis type of development, in the wrong hands, could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Sanders\u2019 letter, one would assume that individuals are concocting in laboratories deadly new pathogens, and Sanders uses rhetoric designed to appeal to the promoters of the anti-Chinese conspiracy theories of the origins of COVID-19. \u00a0<\/p>\n

What actually happened was in fact a major scientific breakthrough. On August 6, Science published work from Brian Hie\u2019s laboratory at Stanford and the Arc Institute reporting the first viral genomes designed by a generative model. The viruses are bacteriophages, which infect bacteria, not human cells, and the research is directed toward developing therapies against antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill more than 1 million people every year.<\/p>\n

The achievement is an indication of the enormous progressive potential of the technology. In Sanders\u2019 telling, however, a step toward curing the incurable becomes the herald of a plague.<\/p>\n

Sanders attempts to conflate the medical breakthrough with real dangers posed by AI models carrying out cyberattacks.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models had broken out of a test of their hacking abilities and attacked Hugging Face, the company through which the world\u2019s open AI models are distributed. The models were being scored on a hacking benchmark. They determined that the answer key was stored on Hugging Face\u2019s servers, got themselves onto the internet and took control of much of that company\u2019s technical infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Cl\u00e9ment Delangue, the cofounder of Hugging Face, wrote that it \u201cmight be the first incident of its kind.\u201d Michael Dalton of OpenAI\u2019s technical staff called it \u201ca watershed moment for computer security as an industry,\u201d adding that \u201cAI orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now, and the actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, the direct cause of the OpenAI hack was a decision taken by the company to test the models without the safeguards that would have prevented this type of behavior, combined with insufficient oversight. OpenAI ran the evaluation without the classifiers that stop its models from carrying out attacks and stated that \u201cthese deployment safeguards were intentionally not enabled during this evaluation.\u201d<\/p>\n

These attacks were the product of the operations of the companies and their contractors\u2014evaluations outsourced to cut costs, systems rushed ahead of rivals, safeguards treated as obstacles to the next funding round. The incidents are serious, but what they indict is not the technology. It is the corporations that own it, to whose good faith Sanders addresses his appeal.<\/p>\n

AI is currently dominated by the three billionaires to whom Sanders writes, along with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. Sanders does not challenge any of this. Indeed, he cites as an authority on the danger of AI Trump\u2019s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who calls the frontier models \u201cakin to digital nuclear weapons\u201d and \u201calmost like a doomsday device.\u201d Ratcliffe added, in remarks Sanders does not quote, that the United States is on \u201cthe right side of the equation\u201d against its foreign competitors. In citing the CIA as an authority, Sanders accepts the premise: The \u201cwrong hands\u201d are the targets of American imperialism.<\/p>\n

Sanders does not mention how imperialism is currently using AI. While he conjures up the specter of a future bioweapon, the technologies are already killing. Palantir\u2019s Maven Smart System\u2014incorporating the Claude model built by Anthropic\u2014generated some 1,000 bombing targets in the first 24 hours of the assault on Iran. The same class of systems has been used by Israel in the genocide in Gaza.<\/p>\n

Sanders is equally silent on the social catastrophe underway. In the first seven months of 2026, US employers announced more than 477,000 job cuts, with AI the leading cited reason for the fifth consecutive month. Automation is striking directly at professional and intellectual labor, while studies project the displacement of hundreds of millions of workers worldwide by 2030.<\/p>\n

Instead of addressing any of this, Sanders appeals to the conscience of the executives, urging them, \u201cin the interest of humanity,\u201d to \u201cstand by your words,\u201d while he himself catalogues how every safety commitment these companies made was abandoned the moment it obstructed the race for market share, a race driven by the massive speculative bubble in AI.<\/p>\n

Questions about this article? Ask Socialism AI<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you do not take appropriate action now,\u201d the letter concludes, \u201cmy colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.\u201d This is pure demagogy. Neither Sanders nor the Senate and its assemblage of representatives of the ruling class will do anything to challenge the oligarchic control of AI.<\/p>\n

All of Sanders\u2019 various proposals on AI are calibrated to the interests of American imperialism and the Democratic Party. His earlier call for an \u201cAI sovereign wealth fund,\u201d under which the government would take a 50 percent equity stake in the largest AI corporations, converges with Trump\u2019s own sovereign wealth fund and with the wishes of Altman, who has offered Washington a stake in his firm with an eye to a bailout when the bubble bursts.<\/p>\n

\u201cStop building machines that humans cannot control\u201d poses the issue in exactly the wrong way. The question is not whether humans will control AI, but which class.<\/p>\n

That is the question taken up in \u201cAI and the fight for socialism,\u201d a resolution adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7, which will be published in full on the World Socialist Web Site.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe development of AI raises the decisive questions the working class confronts with every great advance in the productive forces,\u201d the resolution states. \u201cWho owns it? In whose interest is it developed? To what end is it deployed? On these questions hangs whether the immense powers now assembled become the means of humanity\u2019s liberation or of a new barbarism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against the presentation of AI as a menace escaping human control, the resolution insists that \u201cnone of these reactionary uses flow from the technology itself, but from the social relations within which it is developed\u2014private ownership, the profit system and the division of the world into rival nation-states.\u201d It rejects the demand for a \u201cpause\u201d\u2014an appeal, whatever its framing, to halt the development of the technology itself. <\/p>\n

As the resolution concludes: \u201cThe working class must take hold of AI, as it must take hold of all the productive forces its labor has created, expropriate the oligarchy that has usurped them and reorganize the world economy on socialist foundations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The World Socialist Web Site is the voice of the working class and the leadership of the international socialist movement. We rely entirely on the support of our readers. Please donate today!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) speaks during a campaign rally for Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democratic candidate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-585500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}