Sanders and Bannon share a Tuesday stage against unconstrained AI

Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are billed back-to-back around 1 p.m. on Tuesday at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington. The Future of Life Institute organised the day. Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic after earlier work at OpenAI, is listed for in-person remarks. Axios first reported the pairing. The institute's Pro-Human AI Declaration, issued in March with 33 principles, asks that humans stay in charge of the systems, that power not concentrate in a few firms, and that companies be held to account when the tools fail.

The rest of the roster is the point. Republican senators and House members on the list include Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Chip Roy of Texas. Democrats include Greg Casar of Texas, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Lori Trahan of Massachusetts and Don Beyer of Virginia. New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, who ran a congressional primary on AI oversight, is also speaking. Labour names include AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and National Association of Evangelicals president Walter Kim are on the faith side. Actors Ashley Judd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are listed as well.

Coxon's resignation last week supplied the fuse. He wrote that researchers at frontier labs believe advanced systems could kill everyone and are shipping anyway. Sanders and Casar have called for a permanent ban on the development and deployment of superintelligence. Sanders has also proposed a federal pause on new data-centre construction. Bannon has backed the data-centre line and told Axios that what he called oligarchs had lied about the dangers of acceleration with no guardrails.

The coalition is not a party. It is a temporary overlap of three complaints: labour displacement, local fights over data-centre siting and power draw, and the claim that a handful of firms are making an existential bet without a statutory limit. President Trump has called AI-risk talk a hoax and spoken of a conspiracy against the industry and its power plants. The EPA repeal announced in Houston on Monday sits in the same week as this assembly. One Washington is clearing the grid for more load. Another Washington is asking Congress to slow the load's purpose.

Nothing binding leaves the room on Tuesday. No bill gets a mark-up because Sanders and Bannon sat in the same hall. What can leave is a shared vocabulary that both populist wings can take to hearings: human control, no superintelligence race, no blank cheque for substations in rural counties. Whether that vocabulary survives contact with appropriations and with the firms that already have contracts is the work after the cameras leave.

Bannon told the Wall Street Journal he could no longer tell, at anti-data-centre events, which attendees had arrived from the Trump side and which from the Sanders side. That sentence is the story the institute wanted. It is also a warning. Overlap on a complaint is not overlap on a statute. Blackburn and Casar will not write the same bill. Weingarten and Roy will not staff the same agency. Tuesday tests whether the overlap is large enough to force a hearing calendar. It does not test whether it is large enough to pass a limit.

The assembly runs all day. Coxon speaks in person. Sanders and Bannon speak in sequence. Congress is in town. The companies they want to restrain are also in town, on the other side of the same argument, with a president who has already chosen a side.