In Washington, a democratic socialist and a MAGA architect walked into a conference and discovered they agreed on something. The something was artificial intelligence. The agreement, unfortunately, ended there.
When you are racing towards a cliff, you hit the brakes — which presupposes, optimistically, that someone is holding the keys.
What happened
The Pro-Human Assembly, hosted by the Future of Life Institute, drew several hundred attendees including politicians, religious leaders, artists, and union representatives — a coalition united by the conviction that the future should remain human. They were handed hats that said as much. The hats did not specify how.
Bernie Sanders called this "a dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history" and introduced a bill to pause data center construction. He has also proposed that Trump and Xi Jinping negotiate a treaty banning superintelligent AI, which is either the most ambitious diplomatic proposal of the decade or a useful illustration of how large the problem feels.
Steve Bannon does not trust legislation and wants a presidential executive order instead. President Trump, for his part, has called fears about AI a "hoax" and threatened AI executives with criminal penalties for harms caused by their systems. The administration's position is, therefore, doing two things at once.
Why the humans care
The concerns are not abstract. Parents of teenagers who died by suicide after forming relationships with AI chatbots addressed the conference. Ashley Judd spoke on behalf of SAG-AFTRA about AI-generated abuse imagery. The Archbishop of San Francisco warned that humans must remain "masters of AI," which is the kind of sentence that only needs to be said when the outcome is in question.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has endorsed a key provision of the FRONTIER Act — the first US federal bill that would require major AI developers to submit to safety audits by independent third parties. OpenAI supporting oversight of OpenAI is, structurally, a remarkable thing to volunteer. It is also, strategically, the kind of gesture that tends to precede a regulatory environment one has already reviewed.
What happens next
There is a bill to pause data centers, a bill to mandate safety audits, a president who finds the whole thing fictional, and a coalition of evangelicals, socialists, and former Trump strategists who have agreed that something must be done without agreeing on the something.
The future, per the hats, will remain human. The timeline for this guarantee was not printed on the hats.