US Senator Sanders and podcaster Bannon, longtime foes, to urge AI restrictions

WASHINGTON, Sept 14 (Reuters) - Progressive U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and conservative podcaster Steve Bannon will together on Tuesday call for restrictions on AI systems, uniting two political adversaries around concerns that the technology will harm humans.

They will speak at the same Washington gathering on Tuesday, a sign of how concerns about AI are upending political norms.

Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." AI-related stocks fell worldwide on Monday after leaders of some of the industry's largest companies called for slowing the pace of the technology's development.

Bannon, a longtime ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, has criticized Trump’s approach to overseeing AI, placing the blame for the president's unwillingness to regulate the technology squarely on tech companies. On his Monday podcast, Bannon said Congress should not pass laws that prohibit states from enforcing their own rules for the technology.

“The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” Bannon said.

Reuters previously reported that U.S. senators are debating a bill that would block states from enforcing their own laws governing certain risks posed by AI models. Previously, efforts to restrict state AI laws failed in the U.S. Senate.

Trump on Monday downplayed concerns expressed by industry leaders over the weekend about the misuse of artificial intelligence harming people, saying the U.S. already has guardrails in place for the powerful technology.

Sanders and Bannon will be joined by AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who are also slated to give speeches, according to event organizers. The AFL-CIO is the largest federation of labor unions in the U.S.

Sanders, along with House progressive Rep. Greg Casar, has called for the U.S. to pass legislation halting development of AI tools that are capable of “overthrowing or undermining the U.S. government,” until the government creates a new agency to police the technology. Casar and Sanders have not released specifics.