Senator Bernie Sanders wants to slow down AI development. His reasoning? Neither the government nor society is prepared for what's coming. And while I respect the Senator's intentions, "slow down" isn't a technology policy—it's a wish.
Sanders is calling for the U.S. to pump the brakes on AI advancement, warning that the speed and scale of the transformation ahead will catch everyone off guard. He's not wrong about the preparedness problem. Washington is still trying to regulate social media, and that technology is two decades old. AI is evolving on a timescale measured in months, not years.
But here's the uncomfortable reality: China isn't waiting. The EU isn't waiting. And no amount of congressional hand-wringing is going to change the fact that AI development is a global race, not a national decision.
The Senator's concerns are valid. AI systems are already being deployed at scale without clear guidelines on safety, bias, accountability, or economic impact. We're automating jobs faster than we're creating new ones. We're building systems that can generate convincing misinformation at industrial scale. And we're doing all of it without any real consensus on what the rules should be.
But the solution isn't to slow down development—it's to speed up regulation. The question isn't whether AI advances; it's whether democratic governments can move fast enough to shape how it's deployed.
Look at what's happening right now. Companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into compute infrastructure. OpenAI alone is targeting $600 billion in spending by 2030. That's more than the GDP of most countries. These aren't bets you can un-make. The infrastructure is being built whether Sanders likes it or not.
The real policy challenge is figuring out how to ensure AI benefits everyone, not just the companies building it. That means regulations on transparency, safety testing, and accountability. It means worker protections and economic policies that address job displacement. It means international cooperation on standards, because AI doesn't respect borders.
What it doesn't mean is asking the tech industry to voluntarily hit pause while the government figures things out. That's not how technology works, and it's not how geopolitics works. The countries and companies that lead in AI will set the standards everyone else follows. If the U.S. sits out that race, we don't get a say in the outcome.
