Bernie Sanders just discovered that tech billionaires might not have workers' best interests at heart. Better late than literally everyone else who's been watching this unfold for a decade.
In an interview with NBC News, Sanders warned that AI poses "profound risks" for American workers, could enable robotic soldiers that make war consequence-free, and will concentrate even more wealth among "zillionaires" like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. He's holding a town hall with Geoffrey Hinton at Georgetown to discuss AI's trajectory and its effect on workers.
Everything Sanders says is correct. The top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. Tech billionaires are investing hundreds of billions into AI and robotics. Dario Amodei claims AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and increase unemployment by 20% in the next 1-5 years. Elon Musk says AI will "replace all jobs" and working will become "optional"—which sounds utopian until you realize it means "how am I going to feed my family?"
The problem isn't Sanders's analysis. It's the timing. Where was this urgency five years ago when ChatGPT launched? Where was the congressional hearing when GPT-3 demonstrated that language models could automate knowledge work at scale? Where was the proposed legislation when DeepMind's AlphaFold proved AI could compress decades of scientific research into months?
Sanders complains that "a handful of multibillionaires can determine the future of humanity" and that Silicon Valley thinks they have a "God-given right to rule the world." He's absolutely right. But Congress—including Sanders—allowed this consolidation to happen. They watched Amazon crush retail, Google monopolize search, Meta dominate social media, and did nothing substantive until the monopolies were so entrenched that "breaking them up" became a campaign slogan rather than policy.
Now AI is following the same trajectory, and Sanders proposes... what, exactly? Employee ownership of companies, reduced workweeks, a "robot tax" on large corporations. These aren't bad ideas. They're just hilariously inadequate for the scale of transformation he's describing. If AI really eliminates half of all entry-level jobs in the next five years, a robot tax won't fix that. Universal basic income won't fix that. Nothing short of complete economic restructuring fixes that—and nobody in Congress is proposing complete economic restructuring.
According to NBC News, Sanders wants OpenAI broken up, though he clarified his call "was more general" and applies to several major AI companies. Fine. Break them up. But into what? The technology doesn't become less transformative because it's distributed across more companies. The job displacement doesn't stop because you've created ten smaller AI firms instead of one giant one.
Sanders's warning about robotic soldiers is the most disingenuous part. "If you don't have to worry about loss of life, and what you worry about is loss of robots, what does that mean for issues of war and peace globally?"
The U.S. military has been developing autonomous weapons systems for years. Congress approved those budgets. Sanders voted for defense appropriations bills that funded this research. Expressing concern about robotic warfare now is like expressing concern about nuclear weapons in 1946—technically appropriate, functionally too late.
And the framing is revealing. Sanders focuses on robotic soldiers making war easier for politicians, but the real AI military threat isn't battlefield automation. It's surveillance infrastructure, predictive targeting, cyber warfare capabilities, and autonomous decision-making systems that compress human reaction time out of the loop entirely. Those systems don't require humanoid robots. They're software running on existing infrastructure, and they're already deployed.
Sanders notes he's joining "a growing and bipartisan group" focusing on AI. Josh Hawley wants to limit minors' access to chatbots and track AI-related layoffs. Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks target AI exports to China. This is what political consensus looks like when it arrives after the inflection point—scattered, reactive, focused on symptoms rather than causes.
Sanders is right that there's been "far too little discussion" about AI implications. But discussion isn't action. And action requires political will that Congress has never demonstrated when confronting entrenched tech power. The billionaires Sanders criticizes are funding super PACs to prevent AI regulation. They're securing goodwill from the Trump administration, which prioritizes keeping AI "unencumbered by bureaucratic red tape." They've already won.
Sanders can provoke discussion. He's good at that. But provoking discussion about a transformation that's already happening isn't leadership—it's documentation of failure.
The zillionaires are investing hundreds of billions. Congress is scheduling hearings. One of those strategies will shape the future. The other will generate C-SPAN footage.
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