Bernie Sanders on AI Regulation and the Future of Humanity

It’s hard to believe Bernie Sanders.

Not because the longtime Vermont senator bears the hallmarks of a liar. Yes, he’s a career politician, but the 84-year-old progressive torchbearer counts more viral memes than scandals to his name. Rather, it’s hard to believe Bernie Sanders because, for decades, he’s told Americans that this country can radically change, while championing ideas too far afield from the status quo to really have a chance. He wants to bring billionaires to heel, for one. And implement universal, government-run health care. College tuition? If Sanders had his way, it wouldn’t even exist.

Things can change. I believe it, and WIRED champions it. But change that much? In this country? Really, Bernie?

Sanders, though, is now hard at work adding one more big, improbable change to the pile: Since 2023, he’s been advocating for firm and decisive regulation of the AI industry. In March of this year, Sanders and his frequent collaborator, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, proposed legislation that would halt data center construction until a series of safeguards are implemented. In June, Sanders announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would essentially tax AI’s richest companies and result in direct payments to American citizens.

I wanted to talk to Sanders about those bills, and his perspective on AI more broadly. On a deeper level, though, I was curious about how Sanders sees the barriers to regulation—from tech oligarchs and deep-pocketed super PACs, to a federal administration happier to enrich itself via technology than actually govern it—and whether he thinks those seemingly intractable obstacles can be overcome. After a few months of haranguing, Sanders agreed to sit down, which is how I found myself in his modest DC campaign office watching the senator—thoughtful, genuine, vociferous as ever—grapple in real time with what he describes as “the most consequential, transformational technology in the history of humanity.”

Sanders and I spoke on Tuesday, June 23, as the New York Democratic primary was underway. I woke up the next day, our conversation echoing in my head, to find that a coalition of democratic socialists had swept their respective elections and sent party stalwarts into an existential tailspin. A few hours later, New Jersey representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, became the most mainstream member of the party to publicly support an AI data center moratorium.

The uber-wealthy elites aren’t going away anytime soon. Neither is the president or his band of barely competent cronies. In this country, the tangled roots of power—become a trillionaire, buy an election, build that damn data center—run deep. But the anger of an American majority, across party lines, might soon run deeper. They’re fighting data centers at town halls across the country. Turning out by the millions at nationwide protests. And in New York and across the country, they’re spurning establishment candidates at the polls.

Something, it seems, is breaking. Something has to break. Believe Bernie Sanders? I just might.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Senator Sanders, thank you so much for your time.

BERNIE SANDERS: My pleasure.

Wonderful. I want to start by talking about the sovereign wealth fund that you’ve proposed in the context of AI. Tell us how it would work.

All right. I'm gonna get to that.

Get to it.

One second. I wanna back it up. What drove me to push for a moratorium on data centers and the sovereign wealth fund is the fact that, and I think most people know, AI is being pushed by the wealthiest people in the world, people like [Elon] Musk, and [Jeff] Bezos, and [Mark] Zuckerberg and those type of guys, and they could care less about the needs of ordinary people.

AI is the most consequential, transformational technology in the history of humanity, and it’s being pushed by guys who could care less, just wanna get richer and more powerful. That has got to stop.

What has distressed me very much is, I looked all around me in Congress. You would think that with such a transformational technology that’s going to impact every aspect of their life, there’d be massive debates, right? This committee would be doing, “Oh my God, we got this legislation. What are we gonna … ?” Zero. Nothing. As of this date, as of today, there's not been one significant piece of legislation dealing with AI.

So what did we do? We did two things. Number one, we said, Wait a minute. You’re building these data centers all over the country, and in fact, all over the world. They’re having a very negative impact on local environments, on electric costs, et cetera. Slow it down. Let’s make a moratorium, unless we start getting guidelines and legislation to protect ordinary people.

Second of all, we proposed an AI sovereign wealth fund. It does two things. First of all, most importantly, it says that on an issue of such transformational impact, you can’t let a handful of billionaires determine the future of humanity. The public has got to own half of these industries, meaning that half of the members of the board will be representatives of the public. What’s important is if there are ideas and proposals, or technology, that will lead to massive unemployment or endanger the well-being of kids or privacy rights, you are going to have half of that board say, “Sorry, bad idea. You can’t do it.”

And as AI, as I expect, becomes more and more lucrative, these guys make more and more money, that money should not just go to a handful of very wealthy people.

What is the foundation of AI? What is it based on? It’s based on human knowledge, human work. You’ve written a book, they got it. You’ve written a poem, you’ve done some scientific work.

You've written for WIRED, they have that too.

That's right. Exactly. And what compensation did you get for that?

Our writers and our company and our publication received zero dollars.

Zero dollars.

But the point is, that is the foundation of AI, so the public should benefit from that financially as well. So what we are saying is that half of the increase in revenue, in wealth that is created by AI, should go to the people as well.

These are public companies paying into this sovereign wealth fund?

Right.

The Microsofts, the Googles.

Any company of $200 million or more. The larger ones.

Now, you talked a few minutes ago about members of Congress. The absence of urgency that you’ve seen there. I would argue there has been a consistent absence of urgency among politicians around technology for many decades, and I want to ask …

It's not only technology. It's a lot of other things as well.

A lot of other things, but I’m very focused on technology. What kind of buy-in do you think exists now for the idea of a sovereign wealth fund, and what needs to happen for it to become a reality in this country?

Look, everything is political.

You’re a member of Congress and you say, “You know, I want to talk to some constituents. I’m worried about the impact on children’s mental health, and I’m worried about jobs. You know what? I think we should do something.” You know what happens when you’re running for office? You know what happens the next day? You got millions of dollars in 30-second ads coming out against you.

Right.

So when you talk about lack of urgency, it’s not that members of Congress are stupid. They are not, by and large. It is that they are frightened. You want to be in politics, you want to get reelected. In fact, there was a member that went out, I think on the Democratic side, and said “It might be a good idea to stay away from that issue. Don't think about it.” Because you start talking about it, you come up with logical ideas as to how we go forward, the AI industry’s gonna go after you. They’re gonna spend, in this midterm election, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. They got all the money in the world.

That is why there is no sense of urgency, and that is why we need fundamental campaign finance reform, get rid of Citizens United, get rid of super PACs.

A lot needs to happen to get us there. I interviewed Alex Bores, who has a big day today. We're talking on the day of the New York primaries. You know, there were millions and millions and millions of dollars spent to target his candidacy for exactly the reason that you're citing.

In the context of technology, though, and lawmakers, I don't think they're stupid—at least most of them. I think most of them are smart. Do you think they understand the technology that they ought to be overseeing, and ideally regulating in some way?

I mean, this is so big. I think members grasp onto certain elements of it. For example, I would say that many members are worried about the impact on children. We have heard these horrible stories of kids committing suicide at the advice of bots and so forth. People emotionally respond to that. The idea that we have kids spending so much time with their, quote-unquote, “bot companions.”

Yeah.

I think people sense that. There is some discussion, but not a whole lot, on the impact that AI will have on jobs.

And, you know, some people are saying, “Well, you know, every technology … We don’t have too many blacksmiths anymore, too many elevator operators. The world changes, Bernie. You know, it’s gonna change again. We’re gonna lose jobs, but we’re gonna create a whole lot of new jobs.”

Right.

Well, I’m not so sure that that’s the case.

The truth is nobody knows exactly what is gonna happen. I mean, just to give you one example of it: There are 6, 7, 8 million people who drive trucks, cabs, Uber, Lyft, et cetera, right?

You have been, no doubt, in driverless vehicles.

I’ve been in three or four.

Yeah. I've been in one too.

What'd you think?

Ride ’em. They work very, very well.

They do.

And right now in Texas, you’ve got 18-wheelers that are driverless running down the road. So what happens? Let’s just say that the technology expands to cities and states all over the country. What happens to the 50-year-old guys who are now driving a truck? Where are they gonna go? What jobs are out there? You think they’re gonna go into computer coding? I don't think so.

I doubt it.

Those jobs are gone. Has anyone taken a really hard look at that? I’ll tell you something, it’s even deeper than job loss. You are transforming our relationships with each other, who we are as human beings.

You know, Musk, who lies a lot and is a good salesman.

Who lies a lot.

Lies a lot.

On this, we agree. He lies a great deal.

And he’s a good salesman. You know, he does what he does. But, you know, Musk is the wealthiest, most powerful guy in the world. He says, “Oh, work will be obsolete. AI and robotics will do everything better than you can do it.”

Now, is that half true? Probably. I don’t know. What are you gonna do? What happens to your life? What’s your purpose in life? Your kids, what, are gonna be watching Musk videos all day, and you’re gonna be sitting home while getting a check from who?

We don’t quite know, because if you’re not working, you’re not paying taxes. If you’re not paying taxes, Social Security, Medicare doesn’t exist. Who’s gonna be giving you the check? Are you thinking many of my colleagues in Congress have asked that question? I don’t think so, no. Privacy issues? Every time you’re on the net, somebody’s gonna know something about you.

Go to the doctor, prescription drugs you use, your bank accounts, that will become accessible to somebody. And I’ll tell you something else, just as a politician. It’s happened to me. I don't know if it’s happened to you. Deepfakes are getting very, very sophisticated. Somebody could put words into your mouth, take you right off this show, put different words in your mouth, and most people won’t know the difference.

I actually had a deepfake of myself created just to see what was possible, and then I presented it to the entire company, Condé Nast, which owns WIRED. It was uncanny. It was very funny, but terrifying.

Was it effective?

Everybody thought it was me, and then I walked out on stage. And it was me twice! But obviously, that taken to nefarious ends is a very scary prospect.

We’re seeing it already. It’s already beginning. This guy Massie, you remember, in Kentucky? They had a deepfake of him walking into a hotel room with two women. And it looked reasonably realistic. So how do you deal with that?

You are very much convinced that this is a transformational technology, and I agree with you. I’m curious, though, what has informed that point of view? Has your point of view on AI changed in recent years?

You know, my mind works in weird ways. What really got me going is what I mentioned a moment ago, is it’s like, Oh, there’s an elephant in the room. You don’t notice the elephant is in the room?!

Look, everyone can argue how transformative, what the timeline is, right? Nobody knows the answer to that. No one denies that it’s transformative. I’m a member of the United States Senate, so I’m going around, “Hey, anyone talking about it, thinking about it?” No discussion at all. That got me going. And then I started talking to people like [computer scientist] Geoffrey Hinton.

OK, sure.

You know Hinton?

Yeah.

He’s a Nobel Prize winner in physics.

We did a town meeting last year at Georgetown, and he says that as AI becomes smarter than human beings … I don’t [want to put] words into his mouth. But there is a strong possibility that it will become independent of human control with possible calamitous results. Now, you got a Nobel Prize winner who happens to be one of the godfathers of AI, and others talking about that. You might think that whether it’s a 5 percent likelihood or 3 percent, 8 percent, we are talking about the future of the entire human race, that somebody might stand up and say, “Excuse me, maybe we should do something.”

Not happening. All right. So I got into this thing because I, you know, talk to people, and [what] stunned me, is, to quote you, the lack of urgency that I was seeing.

And so here you are trying to create …

Here I am. Somebody who’s a total nerd. I shouldn’t say a nerd, an anti-nerd. I don’t know anything about this technology. I have a hard time dealing with the TV in the house. But somebody has got to.

I think one of the major frustrations among the American people—I don’t speak for all of them, but I speak to many of them, in our reporting—is the feeling that AI is being foisted on them. That it is being presented to them as an inevitability by the oligarchs, right? By the Musks, by the Sam Altmans, you name them. And that they don’t have agency and that they don’t have control in that. How do you respond to that?

I think you're exactly right. We’re seeing the response in, I think, a couple of ways. Number one, I think a year ago, you and I would probably not have perceived the kind of