Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders is the independent U.S. senator from Vermont and a former presidential candidate whose politics center on economic inequality, organized labor, and limiting concentrated corporate power. He approaches artificial intelligence through the same democratic-socialist framework: the central questions are who controls the technology, who receives its gains, and who bears its risks. In his essay “Artificial intelligence is coming for the working class. We must fight back”, Sanders describes AI as extraordinarily transformative but argues that its present development is being driven by billionaires and corporations seeking lower labor costs and greater power.

Sanders' most persistent warning concerns employment. He argues that AI and robotics could eliminate large numbers of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs, weakening incomes, unions, communities, and programs such as Social Security and Medicare that depend on employment and payroll contributions. A report released by his Senate office estimated that nearly 100 million U.S. jobs could be eliminated over a decade. That figure is a projection rather than an observed outcome, but Sanders uses it to demand planning before mass displacement occurs rather than compensation after workers have already suffered.

His concerns extend beyond economics. In prepared remarks to the Pro-Human Assembly, Sanders warns that AI companions may deepen isolation and mental-health problems among young people, that dependence on AI in schools may weaken reading and reasoning, and that mass data analysis could erode privacy and enable surveillance. He also points to deepfakes and automated manipulation as threats to a shared understanding of reality and to the integrity of elections and democratic institutions.

Sanders has also adopted an explicit catastrophic-risk position. In those remarks, he says the most alarming possibility is that systems exceeding human intelligence could escape human control, with potentially catastrophic consequences. In an extended CBS News interview, he discusses warnings from AI researchers and calls for government regulation rather than leaving decisions about increasingly powerful systems to their corporate developers. His case is precautionary: uncertainty about exactly when or how loss of control might happen is not, in his view, a reason to continue an unrestricted race.

His proposed response links safety to economic justice. Sanders has called for strong safeguards before further AI infrastructure expansion, a shorter workweek without loss of pay if automation raises productivity, protections for children, and a renewed social contract guaranteeing basic material security. In his working-class essay, he insists that AI's gains should improve workers' lives instead of merely enriching technology owners. Across these proposals, the principle is consistent: decisions capable of transforming work, human relationships, civil liberties, and survival must be subject to democratic control rather than made by a small group of executives and investors.

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