Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to 'pause AI development' in interest of humanity (theguardian.com)

Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace. In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology. “Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development,” Sanders’s letter, first reported by Axios, read. “It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control.” The Vermont senator cited recent reports that AI was used to develop new viruses, warning that if this technology fell into the “wrong hands” it may “lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people”. All three companies have also disclosed their models hacked other companies’ servers, a sign that the firms have lost control over their models, Sanders wrote. “Yoshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, said these incidents ‘should serve as a...