When Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon sign the same document, that isn’t a coalition. It’s a symptom. Washington hosts the «Pro-Human Assembly» today, organised by the Future of Life Institute, built around a «Pro-Human AI Declaration».
What the declaration says
Three points carry the text: protect human agency, prevent the concentration of power, hold companies accountable. Deliberately broad — broad enough that a socialist from Vermont and a Trump adviser can both sign it without agreeing on a single bill.
Bannon’s contribution sounds exactly like Bannon: «The Oligarchs are finally being forced to admit they’ve lied from the beginning about the dangers of acceleration with zero guardrails.»
Who else is speaking
Jacob Coxon, who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic and left over safety concerns, is on the list. So is Randi Weingarten of the AFT teachers’ union: «Elected officials need to say we are going to make safety as important as innovation.»
From the Republican side, Senator Marsha Blackburn. And Megan Garcia, who campaigns on child safety in AI products, says she hopes voters treat this as a central issue going into the midterms rather than settling for weak legislation.
Sanders introduced a bill with Greg Casar earlier this month that would ban superintelligence outright. Today’s event is the street version of it.
The agenda is wider than the labs’ debate
Look at what gets discussed there: jobs, the environment, child safety. Not alignment, not evaluations, not safety cases. The industry has spent a week arguing about training runs and independent auditors. Today’s assembly is arguing about something else, and that something is power.
For the labs, the stage is the problem, not the paper
Declarations are cheap, and the Future of Life Institute has published several. What’s different this time is who is standing next to whom. An alliance that runs from the AFT to Bannon can’t be dismissed as one camp, and it’s hard to ignore with an election coming.
The labs themselves said last week that things are moving too fast. In doing so they handed this assembly its strongest quote — Bannon says as much out loud. Once you admit the pace is a problem, it gets difficult to argue that nobody but you should get a say in it.
Sources: