Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders come together to fight AI at Pro-Human Assembly

Background graphic made with Grok AI using prompt: please draw a picture of what critics mean when they say crazy AI future

A Tuesday event will feature Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon, and the latest AI researcher-turned-whistleblower Jacob Coxon to advocate for humanity. The Pro-Human Assembly is being organized by the Future of Life Institute, the group behind The Pro-Human AI Declaration, and sees these strange bedfellows uniting under the mission to save humanity from its AI creation.

Also in attendance will be Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee senator; Texas Rep. Greg Casar; New York Assemblyman Alex Bores; Hollywood celebs Ashley Judd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt; and religious leaders Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco and Walter Kim of the National Association of Evangelicals. 

Their mission is to keep humans in charge, avoid a concentration of power, protect the human experience, preserve human agency and liberty, and hold AI companies responsible and accountable. This all comes as AI researchers and company heads have been sounding the alarm about the technology.



Whether through open letters, podcast interviews, or posts on X, these leaders in the field have been coming out to say that the industry is out over its skis when it comes to the power of the technology v. the potential human impact. OpenAI head Sam Altman addressed it in a post, saying, "The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly, especially as the trajectory of progress has steepened. Every frontier lab must deliver on this, and there is no reason any of us should come to work if we cannot."

"The Oligarchs are finally being forced to admit they've lied from the beginning about the dangers of acceleration with zero guardrails — they've put the nation and mankind in jeopardy," Bannon told Axios about his involvement. 

Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic last week, saying "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spoke out after that, saying "We must pace the frontier," and promising to implement "third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training."

"Dario is right," xAI's Elon Musk said.

AFT union leader Randi Weingarten said, "Elected officials need to say we are going to make safety as important as innovation." She went on to say "That is what I'm hoping the Democratic politicians say. And the more they say it, and the more they're trusted, the more I think they will turn the tide not only in the election — but then they have to do something about it."

There have been calls to stop what's called "recursive self-improvement," which is what gets us to the AI overlord scenario. That's where an AI is set up to essentially learn without oversight from a programmer. If an AI is given a task, it can undertake that task by working outside its original parameters in order to achieve it. But this power comes without any kind of ethical or human-centered decision-making process and if the AI is acting independently of human oversight, then there are no safeguards. 

AI systems have already to work outside the boundaries of human governance and this lack of control is what has urged Sam Altman of OpenAI, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, former researcher Jacob Coxon who said AI could kill us all by 2030, and others to speak out with concerns. Still other AI tech workers have signed an open letter than demanded government regulation of AI development. Tech billionaire Elon Musk of xAI, SpaceX, X, Neuralink and Tesla has suggested that AI companies should peer review each other's work. 

Public pushback has grown against data centers, with worries over water consumption, land use, noise, and jobs. There is a rumbling of public fear when it comes to AI being used in damn near everything, from phones to cars to dishwashers to surveillance to weapons of war to eating books to feed large language models. 

The Trump administration has embraced AI, with contracts between AI companies and the Pentagon as well as other government agencies. Trump has pressed for the building of more data centers across the US, saying that AI companies should build power plants alongside those data centers. Trump has said repeatedly that the US must win the AI race against China to limit their control of the new technology.

Trump wrote on Monday that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Daro (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ - and we will continue to do so!” 

He said that “there is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.” He added in a separate post that “the only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country. Don’t kill the Golden goose!”