World Wild Web
How a fringe AI movement convinced Washington the end is near
By By Ian Duncan & Nitasha Tiku The Washington Post
Published Sept. 18, 2026
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When Sen. Bernie Sanders traveled to the Bay Area this year to question the impact of artificial intelligence, he sought out different perspectives. The result was a "handful" of meetings, including with tech executives, the senator's longtime political strategist Faiz Shakir said. "If they wanted to be on camera, he said, ‘Great, let's do this publicly!'" Shakir said.
But when Sanders posted a video from his trip in March, it showed him talking with only one controversial faction: people convinced that advanced AI is likely to lead to human extinction.
"Once they don't need the humans, the humans are discarded," Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has spent two decades warning about AI eradicating people, said in the video. Sanders, sitting with his chief of staff, appeared shocked. "That's scary," he said.
The meeting between Sanders and advocates of the idea that powerful AI will threaten humanity's future occurred amid a years-long drive by activists to forge connections in Congress and elevate their concerns. In recent days, that work appeared to have paid off.
After Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week and said the people building AI feared it could "kill us all by the end of the decade," existential debate gripped Washington. Lawmakers from both major parties began to echo warnings that AI could snuff out humans.
Connor Leahy, head of the U.S. arm of ControlAI, an organization seeking to ban artificial superintelligence, said the shift has been years in the making. His team spoke with 200 congressional offices in the past 18 months, he said, working to spread what they see as a crucial warning.
"The way a lot of these kind of politics tends to work is that something is completely impossible until it's very suddenly not," Leahy said. "Things can change very quickly. And we've been seeing a lot of very-suddenly-not's lately."
In a subterranean Washington ballroom Tuesday, Sanders ticked through a list of artificial intelligence's potential downsides including economic disruption, educational decline and mass surveillance, before warning there was one scarier still.
"If AI surpasses human intelligence, as many scientists believe could happen, this technology will escape human control with potentially catastrophic consequences," Sanders said.
He spoke at a conference branded as the Pro-Human Assembly that also featured former Trump adviser and "War Room" podcast host Stephen K. Bannon. The event was organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that has been warning about the dire risks posed by AI for over a decade as part of what is known as the AI safety movement.
On Wednesday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) is set to headline an event at the Capitol Visitor Center that includes a screening for members of Congress of a documentary about the race to build powerful AI that features prominent doomsayers including Yudkowsky. The event is co-hosted by the nonprofit Alliance for Secure AI, which has been funded in part by a prominent philanthropy focused on AI safety. Brendan Steinhauser, who heads the group, said it has held 150 meetings on Capitol Hill in the past year.
Sanders has organized his own AI event on Wednesday: a private briefing for his colleagues featuring Max Tegmark, chair of the Future of Life Institute.
Alarm about the idea that AI poses an extinction threat has been until recently largely confined to the fringes of politics and the tech industry.
The AI safety movement emerged from Bay Area subcultures that became fixated on safeguarding advanced AI. It flourished over the past decade with support from a small number of wealthy tech executives. The movement is expected to receive huge cash infusions in coming years as AI company employees cash out stock in start-ups like Anthropic and OpenAI. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
The Future of Life Institute was co-founded in 2014 by a group that included tech billionaire Jaan Tallinn, an early Skype employee. He has become one of the most active funders of the network of nonprofits that work on causes related to existential risk for AI, alongside billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, a major Democratic donor. Many of the AI safety groups they backed have filed federal lobbying disclosures this year.
Sneha Revanur, the founder of Encode AI, a nonprofit focused on AI risks including catastrophic harm, child safety and concentration of power, said it has recently gotten easier to talk about those issues in Washington.
When she first came to Capitol Hill in 2023, her organization would be lucky to get 20 minutes on someone's calendar, Revanur said. Now the group is able to have "extremely clear and forthright conversations about things like extinction," she said.
Encode was partly funded by the Future of Life Institute and another organization linked to Tallinn.
Despite its resources and the apparent breakthrough of recent days, the AI safety movement faces serious challenges in a gridlocked Washington where Democrats have been quicker to take up the cause of regulation. Opposition to the doomsday warnings of the past week has been fierce, with President Donald Trump leading the charge and calling them a "hoax."
The president's response stoked fears within the safety movement that their cause was increasingly being seen as a partisan one, despite activists' efforts to gain influence with Democrats and Republicans, including recent podcast interviews with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
"We lean more libertarian than left or right," said Jeffrey Ladish, executive director of the nonprofit Palisade Research and a former security engineer at Anthropic who also appeared in the video with Sanders and Yudkowsky.
Most people in the AI safety community are opposed to regulating technology unless it's something as powerful as AI or nuclear or biological weapons, he said. "This whole effort to paint the AI safety world as some sort of woke conspiracy is just not accurate," Ladish said.
Revanur, who appeared on Fox News on Tuesday morning, said recent attempts to dismiss AI safety organizations by tech allies of Trump ignored the fact that polling shows voters across the political spectrum are concerned about AI.
Onstage at the Pro-Human Assembly, organizers emphasized that they had the backing of figures on the left and the right. Immediately after Sanders stepped offstage, he was replaced by Bannon.
The former Trump adviser said the presence of two such diametrically opposed partisans was a reflection of the threat posed by AI.
"This is a hinge in history," he said. "We have to handle this correctly."
Recent debate about AI's potential existential threat comes as political groups try to find a message on the technology that fits the moment.
This month, Karthik Ganapathy, a former aide to Sanders, launched a political action committee called Tomorrow Together to push Democrats to address voter anxiety. It has raised more than $10 million from party donors and AI safety advocates through the PAC and an affiliated nonprofit.
The group initially focused on the technology's impact on jobs and education, where voters seemed likely to first feel AI's effects. But that issue has received little attention in the past week.
"The script has totally flipped - if you'd told me two months ago or even two weeks ago we'd have members of Congress saying leadership should stay in town until an AI safety bill is passed, I wouldn't have believed you," said Ganapathy, who left his role in May as a senior communications officer for Coefficient Giving, the dominant philanthropic donor in AI safety, backed by Moskovitz.
"This conversation has gone from abstract to feeling pretty urgent in the matter of weeks, and it's scrambling politics quickly," Ganapathy said.
Encode helped organize a recent open letter signed by almost 1,400 current employees supporting the idea of "pacing the frontier," a coordinated slowdown of AI development to tame the technology's cutting edge.
In the wake of Coxon's resignation, several of his Anthropic colleagues as well as workers at rivals OpenAI and Google made public statements supporting his concerns about extinction risk from rogue AI.
The public calls for attention to the issue were followed on Saturday by an intervention by Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, who called for a industry-wide slowdown. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and tech mogul Elon Musk quickly endorsed the proposal.
On Tuesday, Altman acknowledged the AI fears but said he was "disappointed" in how the debate has been framed.
"I think the world is right to be afraid of this," he said at a conference held by software company Salesforce in San Francisco. "The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and because we feel the magnitude of this."
Chris Lehane, OpenAI's head of global affairs, told reporters Tuesday that the company has been working for several weeks with its competitors to set common standards.
"This is ultimately about how we can develop better and smarter safety systems as we move forward," Lehane said.
But an approach steered by the industry is not likely to allay the concerns of those who fear the technology most, nor lawmakers skeptical of allowing powerful companies to regulate themselves.
"If the lives of every man, woman and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI and not just a handful of oligarchs," Sanders said Tuesday.
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