Bernie's Beijing Panel and the Horseshoe AI Doomers
How a socialist senator, an Effective Altruist organizer, a former White House strategist, and the Chinese Communist Party ended up demanding the same thing.
It is one of the strangest political alignments of the decade: a Socialist senator, an Effective Altruist-aligned chameleon warning of digital extinction, a former White House strategist who repeatedly tried to rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein on camera, and officials tied directly to the Chinese Communist Party’s AI governance apparatus. They’re all converging on the same demand: Slow American technological progress down to a grinding halt.
On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders livestreamed a 75-minute discussion on “AI existential risk and international cooperation” featuring prominent AI doomsday advocate Max Tegmark, the University of Montreal’s David Krueger, and — beamed in from across the Pacific — Xue Lan of Tsinghua University and Zeng Yi of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance.
A somehwat important detail: Mr Xue happens to chair China’s national AI governance expert committee under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Zeng leads an institute woven directly into Beijing’s AI policy apparatus. These are not independent academics offering disinterested wisdom (though they sure tried to convince viewers othewise), they are state-aligned figures whose presence on a U.S. Senate panel marks a remarkable moment. Nothing really surprises me these days when it comes to D.C. world, but it is quite something that a sitting American senator invited officials of a hostile authoritarian power to help shape how the United States should regulate what has become its most strategically important technology.
The substantive ask is just as troubling. Sanders, alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, which would impose a federal ban on the construction or expansion of AI data centers until Congress passes a sweeping new regulatory regime. Sanders’ own office described the legislation as designed to “slow down” AI development.
There is exactly one country on earth that benefits from an American AI slowdown, and it isn’t any free ones. Beijing is not pausing. The CCP is racing ahead, while blocking American companies from recruiting its frontier talent.
What unites these voices is the doctrine of “existential risk,” which is most popular in pockets of the far-left Effective Altruist-aligned ideas space, and it has been laundered into the political right through astroturf groups spawned by its donor class. They claim that AI is so dangerous it must be paused, throttled, or subjected to international “cooperation.” It is a worldview that promotes unilateral disarmament. And its top advocates have been calling for such policies since very primitive iterations of AI frontier models were released to the public.
One of the chief evangelists of this doctrine in the West is Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute.
In March, Tegmark unveiled his “Pro-Human AI Declaration,” touting the breadth of his coalition. Among the signatories he proudly trumpeted on social media: Steve Bannon — yes, that Steve Bannon, who according to records released by the House Oversight Committee conducted more than 15 hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, advised the convicted sex offender on how to “rebuild your image,” and was producing a documentary intended to rehabilitate Epstein’s public reputation in the months before his final arrest.
Oh but the irony deepens. Humans First, the astroturf group promoted by Bannon [isn’t it odd how Bannon, who has a long history of sketchy financial patrons, suddenly found himself perfectly aligned with the niche efforts of leftist San Francisco billionaires?] and co-founded by Bannon War Room commentator Joe Allen, has been promoting a slick “Digital Epstein” video, a cautionary parable about predatory AI grooming the next generation.
So the man who coached the actual Epstein for the cameras is now in the same coalition warning you about a digital one. You cannot make this up.
This is the horseshoe in plain sight. On one end, a self-described democratic socialist senator who has spent decades insisting the American economic system is irredeemable. On the other, a former White House strategist who tried to script the rehabilitation of a convicted child trafficker. In the proverbial middle, an Effective Altruist-aligned Swedish-born Luddite who keeps assuring everyone that “Skynet” is coming and that the only way to stop it is a “global prohibition” on AI advancement. Of course, such a framework cannot be enforced on China but most certainly can be enforced on America. And beamed in over Zoom: actual representatives of the Chinese state, smiling and nodding along.
The ideology that knits this coalition together is not neatly identified within the American political framework. It is, at its core, a counsel of despair toward American technological civilization. It treats the most consequential technology of the century not as an opportunity to extend free societies’ lead but as a problem to be paused, internationalized to a global governing body, and ultimately surrendered. Whether that surrender is dressed in Sanders’ rhetoric of corporate accountability, Max Tegmark’s doomsday hollering, or Bannon’s populist civilizational dread, the destination is the same: everything gets shut down indefinitely, and the standards get written in rooms where Beijing has the “responsible party” seat at the table.
This is what the Bernie panel actually advertised. It’s not so much “international cooperation” between equals as it is a Western intellectual class so enamored of its own apocalyptic framing that it is willfully blinding itself to promote the ultimate luxury belief. Yet the people whose work, wages, and military edge depend on staying ahead are nowhere in the room.
There is a serious debate to be had about AI and how it will change the world, along with temporary labor displacement and accountability. But it cannot be had in good faith in a coalition that includes Epstein’s documentary collaborator and Xi Jinping’s policy committee chair. The Americans whose jobs and futures are actually on the line deserve better than a horseshoe of doomers handing the future of technology to the Chinese Communist Party.
Get these geezers out of government. Enough!
Not so strange. I have never trusted Bannon and the rest are peas in a pod. We do need to address local concerns about the data centers, especially power. AI is coming whether we do it or not. Really a separate issue from AI. More akin to big industrial projects. Can't leave it to local officials since they can be bought and the price is low.