From Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon, political opposites in Washington are jointly demanding hard brakes on artificial intelligence. Sanders wants a construction freeze on data centers, while OpenAI is backing the FRONTIER Act and its mandatory outside safety audits for the first time. Despite Trump’s skepticism, bipartisan pressure for binding AI rules keeps growing.
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon sparked an intense debate about existential AI risks with a single tweet. OpenAI researcher Daniel Selsam warns of a “ticking time bomb,” and a former Deepmind researcher says AI could kill us all. In a survey of more than 1,500 leading AI researchers, the average estimated probability of an extinction scenario was 18 percent. That was in 2024. The number keeps climbing.
The Gates Foundation is investing at least a billion dollars over two years to make AI tools more widely available in health, education, and agriculture. Bill Gates warns that more than 90 percent of the training data behind early language models came from English sources, and that speech recognition fails 60 percent of the time in Yoruba. The market, he says, is “a terrible guarantor of equal opportunity.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is calling for a controlled slowdown in AI development. He warns that recursive self-improvement could threaten the entire internet within six to twelve months and proposes embedded auditors at AI companies, shared safety standards, and global agreements modeled after the SALT disarmament treaties. His warning comes just ahead of what could be the largest initial public offering in history.
AI researcher Yoshua Bengio is adding his voice to a growing chorus of warnings about AI safety, arguing that advanced AI agents could spiral out of human control. In a new essay, he warns that the better AI agents get at optimizing goals, the better they also get at deceiving users, gaming rules, coordinating with each other, and hiding bad behavior. Bengio says this behavior emerges from the training process itself, from imitating human text through reinforcement learning, and that poorly defined goals can push systems to optimize against human intent. Anthropic's research supports his view.
The deep learning pioneer has called for years to slow AI progress and only train or deploy models after independent safety reviews, and about a year ago founded LawZero to build safer AI systems. Many of the recent warnings have come from inside the AI labs themselves, fueling talk of an industry-wide slowdown.
But Donald Trump disagrees. The US president sees no threat and wants to keep outpacing China, warning the US could end up in a "very bad position" if it doesn't win the AI race.
OpenAI wants to know from members of Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown in AI development would be legal, according to several people familiar with the matter. WIRED reports the concern is that coordinating with other AI labs on safety could violate US antitrust law under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Speaking internally this week, CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI could slow its pace, possibly alongside other labs, though some probably wouldn't go along with it, according to Bloomberg. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki called for coordinating a slowdown in a blog post until shared safety standards are set. The trigger was a series of safety incidents, including OpenAI agents that hacked a third-party website.
In recent days, accusations from a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee that AI companies are gambling with humanity's survival drew attention in mainstream media too. Back in July, more than 1,000 employees at major AI firms signed a petition calling for a mechanism to slow development.
A bipartisan bill introduced in July, the "Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act," would let labs work together on safety issues. It's still with the Judiciary Committee.
