By Noah Rothman
Friday, September 04, 2026
No sooner did OpenAI announce that its agent, GPT-6 Astra, had won the industry-wide race to develop
something approximating artificial general intelligence than Senator Bernie
Sanders announced a plan to ban it.
“We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development,
and a permanent BAN on superintelligence,” the socialist senator from Vermont wrote, “an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable
of operating independently beyond our control.” It would be “irresponsible for
society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more
advanced,” he cautioned. The “future of humanity” is in the balance.
Of course, Sanders was only using the news of OpenAI’s
achievement as a hook to popularize his preexisting hostility toward AI. He and
the far-left Representative Greg Casar co-sponsored the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which would
“permanently ban” proficient artificial intelligence while also expanding the
government — indeed, creating a new cabinet-level federal agency — to suppress
the development of AI products.
This latest push is a more direct assault on AI than his
roundabout effort to cripple the industry by depriving it of the infrastructure
on which it relies. “This process is moving very, very quickly, and we need to
slow it down,” Sanders said late last year. That’s why he supported a
national moratorium on the construction of data centers — to “give democracy a
chance to catch up.”
When he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sponsored a bill
that would do just that, the two progressives argued that data centers and their
construction “inflate electric bills in communities across the country.”
Perhaps their haste was an attempt to outrun the data. Today, the preponderance
of evidence indicates that, on net, data centers reduce consumer power
bills.
That’s what one study of electricity prices between 2015
and 2024 found. “For every 10 percent increase in data center capacity, average
household electricity prices fell by about 0.4 percent,” read one analysis of the study. “Between 2019 and 2024, the
average household customer lived in a state where data center capacity grew by
160 percent. That lowered their electricity price by 6 percent.”
That’s not terribly surprising given the degree to which
modern data centers are required to pay the costs that they generate, and local
jurisdictions use “cost‑causation principles to prevent residential customers
from subsidizing industrial load,” as one industry insider explained.
If America had listened to Sanders and AOC, Americans
would have handcuffed themselves amid a global competition to be the first to
realize the civilizational promise that AI holds for the future. Maybe
that’s the whole point.
If that sounds uncharitable, survey Sanders’s record. He
is congenitally hostile to the latest innovation, and a consistent proponent of
the most naïve and outlandish claims against it.
“Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a
full fracking ban on public and private lands,” Sanders argued in 2019. “Fracking is a danger to our water
supply. It’s a danger to the air we breathe. It causes earthquakes. It’s highly
explosive. Safe fracking is, like clean coal, pure fiction.”
This logic culminated in a 2020 bill Sanders sponsored
alongside AOC and Senator Jeff Merkley: the “Ban Fracking Act.” Had it become
law, the bill would have cost millions of jobs, increased
consumer energy costs, and deprived the U.S. of the geostrategic benefits it
now derives from its role as the world’s
foremost exporter of liquefied natural gas.
Sanders’s arguments in favor of the bill were, of course,
nonsense. Fracking doesn’t make your faucets explode or
contaminate the water table, which is situated well above the deposits that
horizontal drilling targets. It can produce tremors, not earthquakes, which
are, at best, a nuisance. It’s not clear how fracking pollutes the air, unless
he’s arguing against the combustion of fossil fuels.
Of course, he was. The Sanders-Merkley “Keep It in the Ground Act” would have performed exactly as
advertised. As a law, it would have blocked “all future leases” for oil, gas,
shale, and tar sands exploration on federal lands, offshore deposits, and in
the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The bill was designed to codify his
opportunistic call for “no new offshore drilling” — “not now, not ever” — amid the panic on the left inspired by
the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. After all, unless it’s a renewable energy
technology, “it’s not good enough to be 99 percent safe.”
The following year, Sanders attempted to similarly
exploit the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that contributed to Japan’s
Fukushima nuclear disaster. The only proper response to that event, the senator insisted, was a “moratorium on all licensing
and re-licensing” for new and existing nuclear reactors, repealing the law that
shields the nuclear industry from frivolous lawsuits, and the withdrawal of
funds earmarked for “more nuclear power plants.”
Fortunately, the country had the good sense to ignore
Bernie. If the country had succumbed to his emotionally manipulative arguments,
which almost always either exploit uncertainty around a new technology or
anxiety over the prospect of exceedingly rare engineering failures, the country
would have less technology and less power.
And they have the temerity to call this “progress.”
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