What an AI “slowdown” could look like

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The leaders of several AI companies called for new safeguards over the weekend. Here are three things government could do.

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If you’d asked me yesterday what Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders had in common, I might have said “white hair.” But after a wild week in which AI doomerism burst solidly into the mainstream, the right-wing provocateur and progressive senator are joining forces — with various religious leaders, lawmakers, and the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, no less — to express their deep concern about AI regulation.

Concern about cutting-edge AI models had been mounting for months as those models increasingly behaved in ways their makers didn’t expect. It exploded last week, when a researcher at the AI company Anthropic resigned publicly and warned that the people building AI “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Do you have questions about this week’s AI panic? Candidly: me too! Submit your questions about AI safety and regulation through this form, and I’ll hunt down the answers for an upcoming edition.

It sounds like science fiction. It is the stuff of science fiction. But it’s not a fringe position: Over the weekend, leading AI researchers and executives also warned that AI is developing dangerously fast and called for measures to rein it in. (We’ll run through those options in just a minute.)

Now, a wide spectrum of lawmakers, activists, and pundits are also calling for stronger safeguards — Sanders and Bannon among them. The pair will speak at an event billed as a “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington on Tuesday alongside Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar, and the archbishop of San Francisco, among others.

But President Donald Trump is decidedly not on board, and it’s hard to see how any substantive AI regulations could pass without him.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers,” he wrote this morning on Truth Social, “and the only one happy about it is China.”

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