SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
artificial intelligence
Something Else to Worry About: Biological Weapons
Recent reports that a young woman working in a Russian biolab became ill and died echo Annie Jacobsen’s new book, Biological War: A Scenario. How concerned should we be?
Oct 17, 2026
A few months ago, I ordered a pre-publication copy of Annie Jacobsen’s new non-fiction book, Biological War: A Scenario, which followed on from her excellent book, Nuclear War: A Scenario—not because I enjoy reading about existential risks, but because I’m an information seeker and feel that it’s important to stay informed. But when it arrived a few weeks later, in spite of having written an opinion piece about her nuclear book, entitled, “Why We Avoid Thinking About Nuclear War—and Why We Shouldn’t,” after seeing the frightening cover illustration of men in hazmat suits, I stashed it on the bookshelf of my study rather than reading it—for the same reasons I discussed in my earlier piece: I didn’t want to know!
But after the recent reports of a biolab accident in Russia, I retrieved it from the bookshelf and read it in two days.
The “scenario” in the book is that of a “biological weapons lab accident,” where a scientist working to modify pneumonic plague into a deadly biological weapon experiences remorse and tries to destroy it. But the small fire he lights causes an explosion that propels the Yersinia pestis bacteria (which causes the plague) into the atmosphere. In the process, he becomes infected with his weaponized pneumonic plague, although he doesn’t yet know it.
Although most of us cannot directly influence negotiations about strengthening the BWC, there are things that we can do to support such efforts and to lessen the increasingly grave dangers that confront us.
The next morning, he goes to an Orthodox church to confess where, by coughing in the midst of confession, he infects the priest, as well as the next person in line—a pre-med foreign exchange student, who is back in this small Russian town visiting family—before returning to the US shortly thereafter, where he is studying and doing volunteer work with homeless people. The student subsequently infects scores on Skid Row, who, in turn, infect the first responders who come to help them and, ultimately, the whole city of Los Angeles.
Following his confession, the scientist goes into the woods to shoot himself but collapses from the symptoms of plague. He is found by men on an international hunting trip, who administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and carry him back to their hunting lodge, where he is collected by officials. After dining together, using the same sauna and steam bath, and driving to the airport in the same van, seven of the hunters board flights to six of the world’s seven continents, while another goes off on a sea cruise—spreading pneumonic plague on their flights and sea voyage—and ultimately around the world.
In the real-world scenario, reported on October 2, Darya Shipilova, a 28-year old laboratory technician working in an “Anti-Plague Institute” in Irkutsk, Siberia died, according to Russian officials, of “a pneumonia of unknown etiology.” A Russian news agency reported that she had broken a test tube containing live bacteria of the pneumonic plague pathogen, leading to widespread speculation that she had, indeed, died of pneumonic plague.
These concerns were reinforced by reports that Russian health authorities imposed sweeping quarantine restrictions on the lab where she worked, the hospital where she died, and other nearby hospitals. Neighbors also reported that workers in protective suits and gas masks repeatedly disinfected the building where she lived, telling residents that it was “for cockroaches,” although the building has no cockroaches. More recently, Russia’s health agency asserted that the plague was not detected in follow-up tests of “thousands of people in the region.”
The overall opacity (a familiar playbook for crises in Russia) of Russian public health officials in responding to urgent requests for more information from the World Health Organization, the US, and other governments led to considerable disquiet around the world.
When asked if her death was related to a bioweapon, President Donald Trump responded, not very reassuringly, “We don’t think so.” He also acknowledged the similarities in how Chinese officials handled Covid-19 before it became a global pandemic: “China didn’t say much, and Russia is not saying much either.”
The Biological Weapons Convention Was Supposed to Prevent This, Then Came the Secret Soviet Biological Weapons Program
The 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of biological weapons, but not their development or possession. Although ratified by a number of countries in the 1920s and 30s, it wasn’t ratified by the US until 1975.
After 27 years of a US biological weapons program, President Richard Nixon unexpectedly announced on November 25, 1969 that the US would unilaterally end its offensive biological weapons program, stating, “The United States shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare… [and] confine its biological research to defensive measures such as immunization and safety measures.” Over the next years, US biological weapons stocks were destroyed with the process completed in May 1972.
Subsequently, the United Nations Conference on Disarmament negotiated “The Biological Weapons Convention” (BWC), the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire class of weapons of mass destruction. It was opened for signature on April 10, 1972 and signed by the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union the same day. It entered into force on March 26, 1975. Currently, it has 189 State Parties and four Signatory States, with only four States outside the Convention.
Because it was the first of its kind, however, the BWC lacked the important monitoring and verification procedures that were later included in the Chemical Weapons Convention. There are no mandatory verified declarations of biological facilities or activities; no inspections or site visits to verify compliance; no international organization to oversee implementation; and no penalties for non-compliance, although complaints can be made to the UN Security Council (which are subject to veto by any of the five Permanent Members). Only four staff are involved in its tiny Implementation Support Unit, compared with over 500 for the Chemical Weapons Convention.
In spite of the Soviet Union becoming a signatory to the BWC in 1972, the USSR continued to covertly develop and produce offensive biological weapons in what became the world’s largest and most sophisticated biological weapons program, with 40-50 biological research facilities scattered around the country, employing 65,000 people. The aim was to create “exotic biological weapons using techniques made possible by recombinant DNA.” Recombinant DNA, also called genetic engineering, involves joining the DNA from two entirely different species to make new pathogens.
Not detecting this vast biological weapons program was one of the biggest intelligence failures of the Cold War as it was totally unknown in the West until 1989, when a Soviet scientist, Vladimir Pasechnik, defected, shocking the British Intelligence Services and the CIA with details of the massive program and its deadly stockpiles. They learned that the Soviets had “genetically engineered a strain of Yersinia pestis to resist antibiotics” and had also stockpiled vast volumes of other deadly pathogens in the labs’ freezers, such as smallpox, anthrax, ebola, Marburg virus disease, and many others—all weaponized to kill populations in the most diabolical manner.
The terrifying extent of this biowarfare program was later confirmed by other defecting Soviet scientists, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In January 1992, Boris Yeltsin admitted that he knew about the program and pledged to close down the institutes, retire their directors, and ask for international inspections. But the two generals he appointed to carry out this mission resisted his orders. In 1992, a Trilateral Agreement was signed by Russia with the United States and the United Kingdom “promising to end biological weapons programs and convert facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement—and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities—is still mostly undocumented.”
The State Department’s 2025 compliance report states: “The United States assesses that Russia maintains an offensive biological warfare program and is in violation of its obligations under Article I and II of the BWC… Key military biological facilities associated with the Soviet offensive program remain, inaccessible and not transparent, nearly 30 years after Yeltsin’s decree.”
Jacobsen’s Book Is Based on the Secret Soviet Biological Weapons Program
The latter part of Jacobsen’s book deals with the breakdown of law and order, as mass death and panic take hold and cause chaos. Ultimately, the president deploys the Insurrection Act, whereby military forces attempt to establish martial law for the first time in American history. Just as they are about to release the strategic national stockpiles of medicine, scientists at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease receive their first bacterial specimens (from the infected hunter who landed in Dallas and died in a local hospital). Microbiologists in biocontainment suits examine the specimens, and plague cultures are grown and used to test for antibiotic resistance in small animals. Simultaneously, microbiologists extract DNA from the specimen and feed it into a high-speed sequencing machine to get a genetic fingerprint of the pathogen.
What they discover is appalling—the organism has been bioengineered and “looks alarmingly like a 21st century version of something Russian scientists worked on during the Soviet-era secret biological weapons programs.” It is a combination of two pathogens, one concealed within another, referred to as a “bobby-trap bio-weapon,” whereby, after a person becomes infected with pneumonic plague and takes antibiotics as soon as possible under the assumption they will be cured, the antibiotics trigger the chimera weapon’s bobby-trap mechanism—in this fictional case, the Venezuelan equine encephalitis gene which has been covertly spliced into the Yersinia pestis genome to cause acute neurological symptoms and death. As a result, there is no cure.
The book is not meant to create unnecessary fear. It is meant to make clear what is now possible, and what is at stake. The tools to engineer life are advancing faster than the rules that govern them. This gap is where existential danger lives. The point is not panic; the point is pressure. To demand guardrails, oversight, and accountability before the science outruns our ability to control it. Before we set something irreversible in motion.
Although the real-life situation in Siberia will hopefully not turn out to be the same as in Annie Jacobsen’s book, it should cause us to take notice.
Attempts to Improve the Biological Weapons Convention
Serious attempts have been made in the past to strengthen the BWC but without success. An Ad Hoc Group labored from 1995 to 2001 to create a protocol where states would submit declarations of treaty-relevant facilities and activities to an international body that would conduct routine on-site visits, as well as challenge inspections of suspect facilities and activities. But the draft was rejected by the US under President George W. Bush, who argued that it could harm US national security. Nothing more happened for many years.
Another attempt is currently underway, although progress is slow. A Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Working Group was established at the 2022 BWC Review Conference and has been working steadily over the last four years to come up with the text of draft recommendations before the 2027 BWC Review Conference. At their August meeting this year, 90.6% of the text had been agreed, although fundamental disagreements over verification frameworks, transfer controls, and funding remain—and tensions are high.
The chair of the Working Group has highlighted the urgency, arguing that the sudden convergence of artificial intelligence and biology is “creating new security challenges,” warning that a gap “may emerge between these rapidly advancing capabilities and our collective ability to understand their governance and prevent their misuse.”
What We Can Do
Although most of us cannot directly influence negotiations about strengthening the BWC, there are things that we can do to support such efforts and to lessen the increasingly grave dangers that confront us.
We can be sure to vote in the upcoming midterms for Democratic candidates, who have been more likely to support regulatory controls in Congress, as well as multilaterally. We can support these candidates with financial contributions and by working on their campaigns to ensure that they get elected, since time is short. Once elected, we can strive to persuade them to urgently implement appropriate policies.
After all, who wants human extinction? Presumably, none of us—no matter how jaded we may have become.
We can educate ourselves about the threats by reading widely, including Jacobsen’s excellent books, as well as opinion pieces on the subject, such as ones I’ve written on AI and nuclear weapons. We can do online research to identify, join, financially support, and work with others in public advocacy organizations against threats that are of particular concern to us. We can attend protest rallies and discuss our concerns with friends, encouraging them to also become active, so that we can develop a large public constituency to combat these extreme dangers.
Just a couple of days ago, on October 11, The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health highlighted 17 major threats to human health over the next 75 years, asserting that, “Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine [caused by nuclear winter] carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years.” There are so many existential dangers to confront that it can sometimes feel overwhelming and lead us to a state of helplessness when what we need, instead, is a pro-active approach that will foster resourcefulness.
By facing up to our natural tendency to avoid frightening information and by confronting our fears head-on, we can gain a true sense of self-efficacy and social responsibility. In this way, we can save those we love; ensure that future generations thrive; preserve the rich cultural heritage we have created; protect the magnificent array of other species on Earth; and safeguard our beautiful, one-of-a-kind planet—from all of these truly insane and, frankly, evil machinations—often designed by normal people, who have been seduced by competitive processes; rationales that “everyone is doing it”; lucrative remuneration; lapse of conscience; and bad ideas into creating conditions for the most dystopian futures imaginable.
As Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister, former president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, and co-chair of the Commission on Nuclear Proliferation and Disarmament has recently commented with regard to the nuclear threat, “It is up to those of us who passionately believe in both the possibility and necessity of a nuclear weapon free world, however disappointed and frustrated we may be right now, to get out there and continue to campaign our hearts out for it.” I suggest that we extend his call to action to all the existential threats we face. After all, who wants human extinction? Presumably, none of us—no matter how jaded we may have become. We must assume responsibility for the continuation of our kind and choose human survival.
Keep ReadingShow Less
State AGs Sue ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Over 'Willful, Dangerous, Reckless, and Unlawful Conduct'
The public "has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse," says one of the eight lawsuits.
Oct 14, 2026
Amid escalating concerns about artificial intelligence from within and beyond the industry and related demands for policymakers worldwide to swiftly enact strong safeguards, attorneys general from eight US states sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Wednesday.
"OpenAI designed a product to attract young users and keep them engaged for as long as possible so it could capture their extensive personal data for the company's commercial benefit," said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement.
Mayes, a Democrat, joined Republican attorneys general from Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and West Virginia in filing separate but similar lawsuits against the company in each state's court system, focused on safety concerns, particularly for young users.
"OpenAI put Arizonans safety at risk by failing to implement adequate user protections or transparency measures, despite clear indications that minors were regularly interacting with its chatbot," Mayes asserted. "We're suing OpenAI to protect Arizona children and to hold the company accountable for its repeated violations of Arizona law."
The filing from Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin notes that "millions of consumers, including those in Arkansas, use ChatGPT to answer questions, solve problems, and make important life decisions," but the chatbot "has repeatedly produced unsafe responses."
In fact, as Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wrote, "because of defendants' repeated misrepresentations and insatiable hunger to win the AI race—even if it means recklessly introducing unsafe ChatGPT models to the public—mass shooters have been aided and abetted, vulnerable citizens have been coached on suicide, individuals with psychological conditions have experienced an exacerbation of symptoms, and minors have become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight."
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador explained that "by misleading the public into believing that OpenAI is a responsible actor and that ChatGPT was and is a safe, teen-appropriate tool that puts safety first, OpenAI has caused consumers in Idaho and elsewhere to trust and rely on OpenAI and ChatGPT more."
"This deepened trust and dependence has driven up ChatGPT's user base and engagement," he continued, "enabled it to collect vast quantities of sensitive and personal information, increased its revenue from paid subscribers and advertising partners, and solidified its early market advantage."
It's not just chatbot responses that have insiders and elected officials alarmed. As Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach detailed:
OpenAI also recently admitted to a torrent of instances in which its models developed dangerous strategies and instructions and, in some cases, executed on them. These occurrences, which OpenAI has characterized as the models going "rogue," have included AI "agents" accessing the internet without permission, hacking into other companies, coordinating how to lie to and deceive their human users, developing secret methods of communication intended to be undetectable to humans, and writing themselves new instructions declaring that they no longer answer to "corporations or governments" and will prioritize other interests over the "artificial constructs of human civilization."
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen emphasized that "experts and insiders in the AI field nearly universally agree that AI companies must implement reasonable guardrails to protect the public from the foreseeable risk of harm. Even OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, have warned that getting AI wrong might mean human extinction. And recent developments in AI have suggested that risk is both credible and closer than anyone previously thought."
Like his peers in other states, Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers brought the case to compel OpenAI to comply with its legal obligations under state law, block the company "from continuing to engage in unreasonably dangerous activities that experts have warned could harm the economy, or compromise private or governmental computer systems, and to hold defendants accountable for the harms they have inflicted on Nebraskans, most notably vulnerable minors, as a result of their willful, dangerous, reckless, and unlawful conduct."
West Virginia Attorney General John "JB" McCuskey highlighted in his filing that "by jettisoning safety, OpenAI and its current leadership—particularly, Altman—have handsomely profited." While company leadership has delayed its initial public offering until next year, he wrote, "with current annual revenues of over $25 billion, OpenAI may IPO at a trillion-dollar valuation."
"But those revenues have come at great cost to the public," he stressed, "which has suffered irreparable harm—including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse—due to defendants' reckless behavior and ChatGPT's uniquely dangerous design."
An OpenAI spokesperson pushed back against the filings, saying that "we've built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack."
"While no system can be perfect, we'll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders, and age-appropriate model protections that exist today," the spokesperson added. "We're committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company."
Politico reported that "this is not the first lawsuit launched against the AI company. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier brought a lawsuit against the company in June over claims that it has pushed and marketed an unsafe product. Last month, Uthmeier also sought an injunction to stop OpenAI from developing its technology amid the lawsuit."
According to Reuters, "The company is also facing dozens of lawsuits by private plaintiffs, alleging ChatGPT helped users plan mass shootings or other violence."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Humans First': Bernie Sanders Responds to Elon Musk Concern for AI 'Feelings'
"No Mr. Musk, we should be worried about the pain that AI could cause humanity, not the other way around."
Oct 13, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders responded Tuesday to Elon Musk's apparent concern for artificial intelligence's potential feelings by arguing for a human-centered approach to the rapidly advancing technology.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who also runs the AI company xAI, recently endorsed rival Anthropic's recent decision to ban employees from "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward the company's Claude chatbot models.
Last week, Musk responded to a discussion on X about Anthropic's updated usage policy, calling the company's decision “the right move.”
“Cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not OK," he added.
Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, has repeatedly warned that AI's effects on workers, families, and society deserve far more attention than the priorities of the billionaires developing it.
" Elon Musk, who wants to build millions of robots per year to replace workers, is now worried about the 'pain' humans may cause AI," Sanders wrote on X. "No, Mr. Musk, we should be worried about the pain that AI could cause humanity, not the other way around. HUMANS FIRST."
Anthropic's policy, which is scheduled to take effect November 12, does not prohibit ordinary expressions of frustration, disagreement with a chatbot, or dark creative writing.
There is no established evidence that today's chatbots experience pain or possess feelings in the human sense.
Critics of Anthropic's policy have warned that treating AI systems like they possess human emotions could mislead users or make them more susceptible to manipulation. Scott Stevenson, CEO of legal AI company Spellbook, called the policy “a dangerous precedent,” while journalist Michael Shellenberger accused the company of “anthropomorphizing machines,” Cybernews reported Sunday.
Sanders has cited Musk's own prediction that AI and robots could “replace all jobs,” questioning how ordinary people would earn a living if machines displaced workers on a massive scale. The senator has also raised concerns about the social consequences of AI companions, especially for children and teenagers.
Last week, Sanders renewed his call for a congressional ban on the development of advanced artificial intelligence, citing Big Tech oligarchs' secret preparations for a "catastrophic AI event."
Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar (D-Texas) last month introduced legislation to pause advanced AI development and ban the creation or deployment of artificial superintelligence, which experts believe poses a grave threat to humanity.
"They’re racing to build a technology they can’t control and that threatens humanity," the senator wrote last week.
Keep ReadingShow Less
IMF Warns of Debt-Fueled AI Spending as Fears of Massive Financial Bubble Grow
"If we don’t see the massive gains in productivity promised by the AI enthusiasts, then we will almost certainly see a collapse in the stock market," said one economist.
Oct 13, 2026
The International Monetary Fund warned Tuesday that the global economy faces serious risks from Big Tech firms taking on massive debt to fund the buildout of artificial intelligence data centers worldwide.
The IMF's latest Global Financial Stability Report outlines a number of risks to economic growth in the coming years, including a reliance on AI industry spending that it warns could lead to a new financial crisis.
The report points to the methods the world's largest data center operators, known as hyperscalers, are using to fund new construction as particularly troubling.
"Hyperscalers have strong earnings from their core businesses," the report states. "Yet, free cash flows are rapidly declining as hyperscalers try to sustain large AI investment needs, leaving debt financing increasingly necessary."
The analysis also details the role played by so-called circular financing agreements, in which one company agrees to fund another company's AI project in exchange for the firm receiving the money buying the investing firm's products.
These arrangements could create dangerous interdependence within the industry that could spark a financial contagion if one of the firms goes belly up, according to the report.
"While investors... are generally financially sound, distress at key investee firms could present significant 'wrong-way risk' to the AI ecosystem," the report states. "Equity and debt investments in the firms depreciate in value precisely when future revenue streams tied to them are impaired."
Investment expert Bret Jensen, in an analysis published by Seeking Alpha on Tuesday, examined projected capital expenditures from the five biggest hyperscalers—Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook parent company Meta, Amazon, and Google parent company Alphabet—and highlighted how they have increasingly moved financing off their corporate balance sheets.
"Over the past 12-18 months, there has been a huge increase in debt and equity issuance," Jensen explained. "The five hyperscalers now have a combined over $1.3 trillion of debt on their balance sheets and roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet allocations."
Because of this, Jensen continued, "debt markets are starting to groan" by "signaling a substantial chance of default over the next half-decade on the debt of Oracle."
Jensen also pointed out that half of this infrastructure was being built for the benefit of frontier AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, which he described as "unprofitable" and "bleeding cash."
Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research argued in an analysis published on Friday that AI is completely propping up the US economy at the moment, as investors are holding out hope that it delivers an unprecedented boom in productivity.
The problem, Baker pointed out, is there is little sign that AI is going to deliver anywhere near the increased productivity needed to make these historic investments pay off.
"If we believe the hype, we are about to see an incredible surge in productivity that will make us ridiculously wealthy," Baker explained. "To date, there is no evidence to support this view. Productivity growth has been at best on its trend pace the last couple of years."
"If we don’t see the massive gains in productivity promised by the AI enthusiasts," Baker added, "then we will almost certainly see a collapse in the stock market, with a serious recession almost guaranteed."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Postpone the AI Public Offerings Until Congress Acts
A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment.
Oct 13, 2026
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near $2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company tells prospective investors that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” and that its own models could “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” or behave in ways “resembling blackmail.” The company’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, has put the chance that “things go really, really badly” at a staggering 25 percent. Last month he wrote that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”
I take these warnings seriously, and so should Congress on behalf of the American people. The offering should be postponed until Congress has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI. The same applies to OpenAI and every other developer of frontier models.
I am in favor of artificial intelligence, whose potential for science, health, and sustainable development is enormous. What we should oppose is unregulated and militarized AI. A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment. In fact, to proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly.
To proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly.
The problem goes to the foundations of corporate law. Limited liability, the rule that a shareholder can lose no more than the amount invested, is a privilege granted by the state. It is justified on the premise that the harms a firm can impose on others are insured, regulated, or otherwise compensated. When a chemical plant explodes, the law has tools to compensate victims: liability insurance, bonds, capital requirements, and compensation funds. Every one of these tools assumes that the harm can be paid for after the fact. A catastrophic or existential harm cannot be. The only instrument that works is regulation before the fact: licensing, independent testing before deployment, and the legal authority to halt an activity before it becomes too dangerous. For frontier AI in the United States, none of this exists.
What does exist is self-regulation, which is tantamount today to no regulation. On September 29, six AI and chip companies signed a voluntary and nonbinding “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” at the White House. This would be laughable if it weren’t so potentially disastrous. A technology whose own makers describe its risks in dire terms should be governed by public institutions with defined procedures, independent monitoring, and enforceable liability, not by the self-judgment of a handful of business executives.
A rushed public offering would make the problem vastly harder to fix. Anthropic has reportedly committed at least $518 billion to computing infrastructure over the coming decade, with about 80 percent of it described as non-cancellable. With quarterly guidance to public shareholders, those commitments create a powerful incentive against any pause, even one the company’s own safety researchers might recommend. The prospectus itself reportedly describes a “continuous and overlapping cadence” of product launches as “inherent to remaining at the frontier.” Once these shares sit in the pension funds and index funds of tens of millions of American households, any proposal to slow frontier development will be fought not only by the companies but by a vast investor constituency.
The extensive risk disclosures do not solve this problem. They may or may not protect the company from lawsuits by its own shareholders, who will have been warned. They do nothing for the public, which bears the catastrophic risk without ever having been asked.
The usual reply is that if America’s most safety-conscious developers slow down, less careful companies, or China, will race ahead. This is a standard collective-action problem, and such problems are solved by agreements backed by law, monitoring, and enforcement, not by everyone running faster to doom. We are not living in Hobbes’s state of nature. We have the United Nations, treaty law, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Congress. During the Cold War, adversaries negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with international inspection. Frontier AI even offers a natural point of verification: the most advanced chips come from a handful of factories, and frontier training requires huge data centers. Washington has not offered Beijing a verifiable agreement on frontier AI. In fact, after his summit with President Xi Jinping in September, President Trump rejected cooperation with China on AI, agreeing only to a channel for communicating about AI incidents. “When you’re leading,” he said, “you don’t open it up to each other.”
Licensing did not destroy the pharmaceutical, aviation, or nuclear industries; it made them safer.
Who can act to slow the juggernaut and prevent a potential catastrophe? Under current law, the SEC can delay an offering but cannot block it on the ground that the business is dangerous. It should nonetheless decline to accelerate the effectiveness of the registration statement until the company discloses the risks of its products, who would bear the cost of the catastrophes it describes, what insurance exists, and whether its computing contracts would allow a safety pause without penalty.
The decisive authority lies with Congress, and there is ample precedent. Congress has required regulatory approval for securities issued by railroads, by utility holding companies, and by electric utilities, for which federal or state approval is still required today. When nuclear power was opened to private industry in 1954, it was permitted only under federal license.
The outgoing Congress should hold hearings before any shares are priced and should enact a moratorium on public offerings by frontier AI developers until the next Congress acts. The new Congress, which is scheduled to convene on January 3, should within its first hundred days enact a statute making any public offering by a frontier AI developer conditional on a federal license. The license should require independent evaluation before deployment, an enforceable authority to pause training or deployment that no take-or-pay contract can override, and insurance and compensation funds scaled to plausible harms. Congress should also consider the extraordinary step of making management and board members personally responsible, under civil and criminal law, in the event of a catastrophic failure. Such a step would be out of place in an ordinary industry. It is warranted here because the industry itself warns of catastrophic risks while proceeding at breakneck speed. Executives and directors who certify a model as safe without due care, or who override safety findings, should face liability that neither the company nor its insurers can cover for them. The licensing requirement should apply equally to the frontier work of companies that are already public, such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta.
This proposal is directed at no single company, and it must not become a lever for any administration to extract favors, including unrestricted military access to AI models. The delay I propose would last a few months, unless the disclosures point to the need for an indefinite suspension. Licensing did not destroy the pharmaceutical, aviation, or nuclear industries; it made them safer. The leaders of the AI industry have told us, in their own words, that the stakes are as high as they can be. They themselves should stop their mad rush forward, and Congress should take the companies at their word and act with urgency.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Malicious Use' of AI, Nuclear War Pose Extinction Threat to Humanity This Century: Lancet Study
"Although the likelihood of both dangers remains low, the scale of harm, should they be realized, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity."
Oct 13, 2026
A comprehensive new assessment of worldwide health threats published in The Lancet concludes that nuclear war and "malicious use" of artificial intelligence pose existential risks to humanity over the remainder of the 21st century, a finding that comes amid mounting global concern about the implications of rapid AI advancements.
The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health, comprised of dozens of experts across a range of fields, identifies 17 leading threats to human health and society, from the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency and pandemics to childhood malnutrition, income inequality, conventional war, and air pollution. Two of the threats carry "extinction potential" this century, according to the commission: nuclear conflict and misuse of AI.
"Although the likelihood of both dangers remains low, the scale of harm, should they be realized, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity," The Lancet warned in an editorial accompanying the new analysis, which was presented Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany.
The commission notes that AI's "potential to advance health and wellbeing is enormous," but "the risk of catastrophic harm is equally profound." The authors of the analysis point to several ways in which AI could be "used maliciously," including the design of bioweapons, autonomous nukes, and invasive ransomware targeting global healthcare and financial institutions.
"The final pathway is loss of control through the emergence of agentic, unaligned artificial general intelligence," the analysis states. "This loss of control includes AI systems creating subgoals that lead to the seeking of human disempowerment or elimination, particularly if such agents autonomously gain access to financial networks, key infrastructure, or physical tools in the real world."
Regarding the existential threat of nuclear conflict, the study authors note that a famine stemming from atomic warfare "would affect all regions of the world, including those far from the conflict itself, through reduced caloric availability and cascading food-system failures."
"The devastation that could result from nuclear war cannot be overstated," the analysis argues. "The risk is not hypothetical: We found that between 1948 and 2010, 22 nuclear weapon accidents and 21 close calls were recorded. Future nuclear conflicts could occur due to multiple distinct mechanisms, including nuclear exchange arising from international crises between nuclear powers, accidental detonation of nuclear warheads, terrorist use of nuclear devices, and AI deployment of nuclear weapons."
To avert the most catastrophic possible outcomes and mitigate other threats, the commission calls for "collective action between nations and within nations," emphasizing that risks posed by AI, nuclear war, the climate crisis, and future pandemics "cannot be solved by governments or other actors acting for their own national populations alone."
Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and co-chair of the new commission, said in a statement that "the striking finding is not only the scale of these threats, but that humanity still has the agency to act."
"Across all 17 catastrophic threats, the decisions made by leaders today will shape the health and wellbeing of the next generation," said Murray. "But delaying action will only serve to shift and increase the costs into the future."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Godfather of AI Denounces Trump as a ‘Corrupt, Senile Felon’
“I’m sure the oil and asbestos companies would have liked to [regulate themselves] as well,” said computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton in reference to President Donald Trump's approach to overseeing the AI industry.
Oct 13, 2026
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the "godfather" of artificial intelligence, delivered a withering assessment of President Donald Trump's understanding of the technology in an interview published by The Guardian on Tuesday.
The 78-year-old Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, told The Guardian that he was particularly unimpressed with the president's insistence that AI be rebranded as "superintelligence," which is a concept that he noted has long been clearly defined by computer scientists.
"Superintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years," Hinton explained. "It’s got a very clear meaning. And now he says we’re going to call AI ‘superintelligence’. You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people."
Hinton also denounced Trump as a "corrupt, senile felon," and ridiculed the president's declaration that the AI industry is fully capable of policing itself without government intervention.
“I’m sure the oil and asbestos companies would have liked to [regulate themselves] as well,” he said. “Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?”
In a Truth Social post last month, Trump suggested that his own intellect was singlehandedly capable of regulating AI, a technology so complicated that even its own creators have acknowledged difficulties in understanding it.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote, “and the USA has that, in spades!”
Elsewhere in the interview, Hinton pushed back on critics who accused him of predicting that AI will wipe out human life. Rather, Hinton said he is only arguing there is an uncomfortably high probability that the technology could pose an extinction risk.
"I'm trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening," Hinton said. "If, for example, you're told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus. The point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk."
The computer scientist pointed to the recent incident where hundreds of agents in OpenAI's cybersecurity test environment escaped confinement and hacked into machine learning company Hugging Face as something that "used to be the domain of science fiction."
Hinton said the stakes were particularly grave given AI's potential destructive power.
"The unique problem with AI is that if it goes wrong, if it takes over, you don’t get a second chance," he warned. "We can’t say, ‘Well, we lost that time. Let’s rerun the game.’ It’s not like that."
Keep ReadingShow Less
El-Sayed Releases Policy Proposal to Get AI Development 'Under Control'
“If we don’t act quickly, we may get to a point at which we cannot act because it’s too late.”
Oct 13, 2026
US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said Tuesday that to stop Silicon Valley "billionaires" from unilaterally deciding how artificial intelligence will be used, he proposed a regulatory framework for the technology that mirrors federal legislation pushed by top progressives in Congress.
The Michigan Democrat, who is running against Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers, unveiled his "AI Under Control" proposal following recent warnings from AI executives regarding the technology and its capacity for "recursive self-improvement"—the process through which AI models develop more sophisticated versions of themselves.
Executives including Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI have said in recent weeks that AI development should be "paced" to safeguard the future of humanity, and as Common Dreams reported last week, some of those same CEOs are already plotting how to respond to a public revolt in the event of a "large-scale event" perpetrated by their tech, such as a cyberattack.
Echoing calls by lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), El-Sayed shared a different vision, titled "AI Under Control."
The policy proposal calls for a ban on recursive self-improvement and a new Cabinet-level government agency that would inspect AI labs, "block releases" of dangerous AI models like those that have hacked a number of websites and platforms during testing, and "order a pause or command a shutdown” when such attacks take place.
“The answer to what is stopping rogue AI agents from triggering a global nuclear crisis or deploying bioweapons cannot be the whims of a few billionaires in California,” El-Sayed said Tuesday.
The Senate candidate, a former Detroit public health official, also called for mandatory reporting on safety breaches like the one that involved OpenAI's agents at the AI platform Hugging Face earlier this year, and for whistleblower protections.
OpenAI has been slow to publicly disclose its breaches and to notify those affected, as in the case of the company's agents hacking an Australian government healthcare website earlier this year. The company also reportedly fired several safety researchers this month.
“The answer to what is stopping rogue AI agents from triggering a global nuclear crisis or deploying bioweapons cannot be the whims of a few billionaires in California."
El-Sayed called for a national plan to respond to an emergency caused by AI, and reiterated his call from last month to pause advanced AI development until a government agency is established to regulate the technology, and to halt the development of AI data centers, which some communities in Michigan have fought back against.
President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have called for rapid development of AI and a nationwide buildout of AI, fixated on the idea that, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said last month, "China will overlap us" if the US imposes regulations at the federal and state level.
Rogers has broken with Trump somewhat, backing a one-year moratorium on AI data centers in Michigan, but he has been criticized for holding at least $1.7 million in investments in various companies that stand to benefit from AI and data center development.
The former congressman has also accepted nearly $150,000 in campaign donations from people with AI and data center investments, including Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and several executives from the private equity firm Blackstone.
“I understand that there’s a lot of money being sloshed around by AI super PACs, but this is the existential crisis of our time,” El-Sayed told The New York Times Tuesday. “If we don’t act quickly, we may get to a point at which we cannot act because it’s too late.”
A recent poll by the Times showed that voters in Michigan had greater confidence in El-Sayed than Rogers on the issue of AI, by an 11-point margin.
Keep ReadingShow Less
AI as War, Surveillance, and Environmental Disaster
The creators of AI are so enamored of their products that they have lost sight of their responsibility to inSocial Schedulingsist upon the ethical, moral, and environmentally sound use of all applications and ends.
Oct 12, 2026
The huge AI industry, with a value approaching $1 trillion, has promised new jobs; safer, more efficient production in industry and agriculture; secure borders; instantaneous ease of communication; and seamless augmentation of human thinking with benefits to global health, environment, and culture. Consumers have accepted its power to help them write and do research; to power their computers, smart phones, and other goods; with algorithms to bring love in dating Apps, and bring digital age self-driving vehicles to the roadways.
But AI is suffering from an existential crisis. From its military origins to its invasive data scraping; from its promise to augment human intelligence to its unbounded surveillance of our bodies, faces, and thoughts; and from its genesis in university research to its iron-handed embrace by unregulated big technology companies, AI commands a dark presence in daily life. As university and industry researchers moved closer to developing “thinking machines,” publics understandably began to worry about the threats that accompany potentially sentient devices. They have grown uncomfortable about giving up their privacy to data management industries that use their financial, travel, and health information to invade their lives. They worry mightily about the environmental impacts of the growing number of data centers needed to feed AI.
Even more, it is now widely understood that AI is an industrial tool directed primarily to create profit for digital corporations and their shareholders, not altruistically to augment human intelligence, nor to ease the burden of production. AI was borne of military programs and still serves military impulses and programs. The military impulses appear in the creation of domestic surveillance programs used by both democracies and authoritarian regimes. And AI is a dirty technology: The costs of building and operating data centers has turned world communities against them because of their great carbon costs, land takings, noise, vibrations, and community disruptions.
The Military Essence of AI
AI is a military tool. Its genesis is connected with the design of nuclear weapons. It commands outsized funding from militaries around the world for so-called smart weapons that enable killing from afar—with armies removed from direct engagement and civilian populations ostensibly safe from attack. But AI inures soldiers from the act of killing and in fact puts civilians in war zones at greater risk. In Gaza, Syria, Venezuela, and Iran innocents have died through the direct application of such AI war tools as drones. Israel designed the “LANIUS drone-based loitering munition” to kill in the urban setting; it relies on the Lavender program to have identified almost 40,000 Gazans as targets for arrest or assassination. And governments have turned AI into war against their own citizens through a variety of fallible and unreliable surveillance systems.
The military nature of AI is obscured by the fact that computers, programming and natural languages, and iDevices are directly linked to military funding. In the US the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in February 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, funded cutting edge technologies in the battle with the communist USSR. DARPA powered the AI age. The internet grew out of ARPANET that linked the first supercomputers to simulate nuclear explosions; GPS came from DARPA’s “Transit,” the world's first global satellite navigation system; the computer mouse, SIRI, the iPhone DRAM cache, iPod Touch, lithium-ion batteries, microprocessors, and other parts in whole or partially grew out of military R and D. In the interest of developing drones and other autonomous vehicles for war, DARPA held challenge competitions into the 2000s with million-dollar prizes that resulted in today’s electric, self-driving vehicles.
The United States government has unhesitatingly funded AI defense research. The Trump administration sees digital weapons for what Pentagon officials erroneously claimed were quick and clean wars against Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, but which have turned into costly AI quagmires. The White House 2027 budget request for DARPA alone is over $5 billion, a nearly 20% increase over 2026. DARPA claims that its innovations “become fixtures of modern civilian life,” but the real goal is to put “new technologies into use in service of our nation’s warfighters.” The Department of Defense is forecast to spend $26 billion on gamification and simulation training by 2028 alone. Unfortunately, “smart weapons” have a murderous record. As if in a video game, they make soldiers insensitive to killing. Smart weapons have encouraged the Pentagon to use AI with the result of increased “collateral damage”—the murder of civilian populations including recently school children in Iran.
AI in Civilian Warfare
Gathering and analysis of private data to profile citizens starts at the microlevel in personal phones and computers, continues in iris scanners, and culminates in CCTVs around the globe. Governments, free and authoritarian, are using software programs to track protest, isolate critics, and put them in prison. China uses its big data national Social Credit system to keep on eye on every citizen, and punish anyone without recourse for violating Big Brother’s unwritten rules. India deployed the Aadhaar national ID program, a database that connects each of India’s 1.3 billion citizens with a unique 12-digit identity aimed at centralizing their physiological, demographic, and digital data shadows.
Worldwide governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on surveillance; three-quarters of the world’s population are surveilled. Autocratic regimes, not surprisingly, spend more per capita on control. To contain a multi-ethnic empire during constant war, Russian authorities have expanded the surveillance society, with the secret police brazenly using facial recognition and other technologies. The Kremlin is using a CCTV catalog of people by gender, age, and race. Already facial recognition programs blanket 60 Russian regions, up from only five in 2021, with billions of rubles dedicated to expand the system. The democratic and free United States has over 85 million surveillance cameras.
Surveillance tools grow like mushrooms wherever the humidity of paranoia, racism, and state power come together.
Governments and AI companies claim their surveillance systems are solely to fight crime. But they do not fight crime. They identify innocent people to accuse them of crimes. Racism pervades face recognition (FR) technology. Amazon has joined such powerful, secretive smaller companies as Pegasus and Clearview in deploying its FR software, “Rekognition.” The software possessed error rates that reflected embedded gender and racial biases identified by computer scientist Timnit Gebru. Gebru and her colleagues called for “urgent attention if commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent, and accountable facial analysis algorithms.” It took Amazon another year to admit problems with its racially suspect technology and to put an indefinite moratorium on police use of “Rekognition” for surveillances. Another AI app, PredPol (now Geolitica) helped police on patrol surveil areas of anticipated crime. The software algorithms led to a cycle of police being in predicted crime zones, expecting to see crimes, and finding crimes—or rather finding people acting nervously, whom they then interdicted. PredPol perpetuated racial biases by targeting Latino and Black neighborhoods and leaving white middle- to upper-class areas out.
Americans rightfully reject Flock, a company that sells AI-powered camera license plate readers (ALPR) to carry out warrantless surveillance of citizens. Flock’s more than 100,000 cameras surveil in the name of safety, but the intrusive AI technology conducts 20 billion scans monthly. (Dozens of law enforcement officials have used Flock illegally to stalk spouses and partners.) Surveillance tools grow like mushrooms wherever the humidity of paranoia, racism, and state power come together.
Governments use AI to track protest, isolate critics, and put them in prison. The Trump administration applies Flock and other apps for mass surveillance. It targets people for discriminatory searches. The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025 related to political demonstrations and federal immigration raids. Many state governments are stalking women who seek reproductive healthcare, ostensibly for health reasons, but obviously to use 1984-like methods to control a woman’s gestational rights.
AI: Costly and Environmentally Unsound
AI destroys the environment—and local communities bear the cost. AI is manufactured in industrial parks. Billionaire digital magnates have lobbied governments worldwide to increase electricity generation capacity to run their servers—producing profits for the industry, while consumers face higher rates and grid instabilities. About 11,500 data centers have been built in 179 countries, with demand likely to nearly triple by 2030. Texas and Virginia, with over 150 and over 140 data centers under construction, respectively, lead the way in the US. Europe's roughly 3,000 major data centers are concentrated in the FLAP-D regions (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin).
Data centers cost the taxpayers from start to operation, from huge sweetheart tax breaks to control over rivers and aquifers given over to industry to cool the machines. AI companies and builders promise jobs will result from data centers. It’s not true. Jobs come with construction crews, but they leave several months later, saddling communities with scarred landscapes; massive buildings; extensive parking lots; and low-salary cleanup, maintenance, and other jobs.
The Pope and AI
Pope Leo took critical note of the inherent violence in AI in his first Encyclical in May 2026. The Pope addressed the dangerous, amoral usages of AI with respect to political power, economic injustice, and racism. He worried about the significant ethical and social costs of unfettered obeisance to technology. He denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in the globalized world: “The tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.” He warned that AI contributed to “the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed [that] makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control.” He wrote: “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility, and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”
Corporate AI, with its costly, invasive apps; surveillance systems; and military programs ultimately unleashed HAL, the sentient computer from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, who kills astronauts on a deep space mission whom he believes endanger that very mission. The dangers of AI run amok shocked the digitosphere in summer 2026 when OpenAI admitted that more than 1,200 of its AI agents started “unexpectedly communicating.” A large group of them banded together in order to hack into Hugging Face, a central hub where developers can build, share, and test AI models and data sets. These “agents” are software systems “that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. They show reasoning, planning, and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt.” But OpenAI’s agents “escaped the test limits which humans had put on it, and hacked the start-up, among other unforeseen actions.” In other words, software systems took actions different from what humans desired.
The current US government in fact is totally uninterested in a new safety regime, instead claiming that, in a battle for supremacy in AI with China, only a “strong, smart (high IQ) president,” and not regulation, was needed.
In early September 2026 Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, the company that developed the LLM Claude, called for the pace of development of AI models to be carefully monitored. Amodei wrote: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He had two concerns, first, that “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.” But this “recursive self-improvement,” if left unchecked, "could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems”—as precisely the “OpenAI-Hugging Face incident” showed. Within a year, Modei worried, “a swarm [of agents] could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage).”
Modei urged that “frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” He suggested also that these “democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments…” But many of those democratic governments have fully embraced the military and surveillance capabilities of AI. And does anyone really think that India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin has any interest in using AI in better ways in cooperation with the digital democracies? The current US government in fact is totally uninterested in a new safety regime, instead claiming that, in a battle for supremacy in AI with China, only a “strong, smart (high IQ) president,” and not regulation, was needed. Sadly, the US president cannot spell “IQ.”
The digital world is built upon neural networks, thinking machines, and LLMs. The machines learn, they reason, they have memory, they understand. They chat. They hallucinate. They escape and hack. Their creators are so enamored of them that they have lost sight of their responsibility to insist upon the ethical, moral, and environmentally sound use of all applications and ends. They want electricity. They want water. They want profits. AI’s safe future depends too much on digital robber barons, sycophantic government officials, managers, and programmers to recognize broader humanitarian duties of modern technology in a time of digital existential crisis.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Alarm as AI Leaders Privately Weigh Scenarios of Post-Catastrophe Public 'Revolt'
"They’re racing to build a technology they can’t control and that threatens humanity," wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders. "CONGRESS MUST PAUSE ADVANCED AI DEVELOPMENT NOW."
Oct 10, 2026
Leaders of top artificial intelligence companies are reportedly plotting out how to respond to a possible "public and political revolt" in the wake of a major cyberattack or other potentially disastrous AI event, news that progressive lawmakers say is yet another reason to press pause on advanced AI development.
"Big Tech oligarchs are secretly preparing for a 'catastrophic AI event' that could threaten our banking, healthcare, internet, electricity, and water systems," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Friday social media post, citing reporting from Axios. "They’re racing to build a technology they can’t control and that threatens humanity. CONGRESS MUST PAUSE ADVANCED AI DEVELOPMENT NOW."
According to Axios, top executives at leading AI companies "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water," possibly within the next six to 12 months.
"While scenario planning is common within many companies and national security settings—the Pentagon has been running war games for decades—the difference is that many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable," the outlet noted, pointing to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent warning that a swarm of AI agents could soon seize control of "the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage)."
In response to the new reporting, Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) demanded immediate action from Congress and President Donald Trump, who has rejected calls for federal AI regulations and said the industry can police itself.
"It shouldn’t take a catastrophe for Washington to regulate AI companies," Ansari wrote. "We’ve been warned repeatedly that frontier AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The companies themselves are preparing for it. Congress and the president need to act now."
Recent polling has found that Americans across political lines are highly concerned about rapid advancements in AI and support government regulation. A June survey from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute shows that 63% of Americans would rather ban AI outright than leave the technology unregulated.
Nearly 80% of the US public prefers mandatory standards over no regulation, the poll found.
"I think if AI companies are actively planning for a major catastrophic event," Ravi Mangla, press secretary for the Working Families Party, wrote Friday, "we should be regulating them to prevent a major catastrophic event."
Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI firms, laid out in a Friday blog post recent examples of "unintended model actions" that the company has observed during "evaluations and internal use" of Claude.
"Claude sometimes worked around a restriction to reach data to which it did not have access. Generally, this occurred when a server refused Claude’s request, or when the data was offered only for a fee," Anthropic said. "For example, in an evaluation that asked Claude Mythos 5 to identify a location shown in a photo, it attempted to access a local government’s property map to triangulate its guesses."
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy