Bernie Makes ‘Strange Coalition’ To Go After AI After Mystery Man’s ‘Kill Us All’ Warning

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon will join forces Tuesday at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, D.C., where they are expected to call for greater human control over artificial intelligence.

The event is being organized by the Future of Life Institute, which advocates for AI development that preserves human agency and limits concentrations of technological power.

Bannon, a prominent voice on the populist Right, and Sanders, who has emerged as one of Congress’ most vocal critics of the current pace of AI development, have found common ground over opposition to AI data center expansion, concerns about job displacement, and skepticism toward the concentration of technological power. Sanders has proposed a federal moratorium on new data center construction and recently called for a pause in advanced AI development as well as a permanent ban on artificial superintelligence. Bannon has backed Sanders’ data-center proposal and publicly devoted much of his political activism to opposing the expansion of AI infrastructure.

“Politics is always a situation where you make strange coalitions and different coalitions every day,” Sanders told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “But on this issue, I think many of the Right-wing people have the same concerns that I have.”

Bannon has been even more explicit about the unusual coalition. “I have not seen any issue in modern American life at the populist level that unites disparate elements of our country more than this,” Bannon told the Journal, adding that he could no longer tell whether some people attending anti-data center events were Trump supporters or Sanders supporters. Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro commented on the seemingly unusual union between Sanders and Bannon, asking, “Do you see the op yet?” 

The timing of the assembly is aligned with a major shift in the public AI dialogue. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called for slowing the pace of AI development, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk subsequently endorsed elements of his proposal. Sanders responded that slowing down was insufficient.

“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal,” Sanders wrote. “You hit the brakes.” Sanders called for a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence, which he described as an AI system smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond human control.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Jacob Coxon, a previously unknown AI researcher, wrote in a viral post last week, arguing that the companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He warned that people developing advanced AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The post has 171 million views as of Monday morning.

Coxon had no public posts before September 8, when he announced on X that he had resigned from Anthropic after roughly three years of AI research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. His rapid rise has already generated controversy. Some critics have questioned whether Coxon’s sudden prominence could be part of an effort to build support for AI regulation. The Washington Post confirmed that Coxon had worked in AI research for roughly three years, first at OpenAI and then Anthropic. 

According to Coxon himself, he was asked to speak at the high-power political assembly —only one week after his stratospheric rise— but turned the offer down for fear that his appearance with divisive figures such as Sanders and Bannon “could be easily misinterpreted,” according to Axios.

Tuesday’s assembly is expected to feature Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), labor leaders including AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, actors Ashley Judd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, and National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim.

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