Bern notice: Sanders’ AI plan puts Washington in charge of tomorrow



Americans should pay close attention to a new artificial intelligence proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a democratic socialist, and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas).

Sanders and Casar recently announced plans to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Their proposal is designed to prevent the creation of artificial intelligence systems that become more intelligent than human beings or develop capabilities that could threaten humanity.

Overseeing frontier AI would be more difficult than running a railroad or postal network.

The dangers they identify deserve to be taken seriously. But their proposed solution would also place extraordinary power over one of the most consequential technologies in human history in the hands of the federal government.

According to a summary released by Sanders’ office, the proposal would permanently prohibit the development and deployment of artificial superintelligence, including systems that surpass human intelligence, threaten governments, or evade human control. It would also pause advanced AI development until a new federal regulator establishes safety rules and a process for reviewing models.

That is only the beginning. Sanders and Casar want to establish a new Cabinet-level agency responsible for regulating advanced artificial intelligence. The agency would monitor frontier AI systems throughout their development, oversee the removal of capabilities deemed dangerous, and supervise the destruction of prohibited artificial-superintelligence systems.

The proposal also contemplates severe penalties. People who violate or circumvent its restrictions could face up to 20 years in prison. Companies could face what Sanders’ office calls the “corporate death penalty.” The United States would also pursue international agreements, export controls, and allied coordination intended to prevent artificial superintelligence from being developed elsewhere.

Without a doubt, advanced AI could pose serious threats to human freedom and security. A system capable of evading human control, conducting sophisticated cyberattacks, helping develop biological weapons, or manipulating critical infrastructure would present risks unlike almost anything governments have confronted. Sanders’ office cites reported incidents involving advanced AI systems as evidence that the technology is becoming increasingly difficult to control.

The key question is whether giving Washington sweeping regulatory authority would solve more problems than it causes. The federal government does not exactly have an impeccable record managing complicated institutions.

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The Postal Service reported a $9 billion net loss in fiscal year 2025. Amtrak, despite record ridership and revenue, reported a $598.4 million adjusted operating loss for the same fiscal year. The federal government had accumulated a $2 trillion deficit through the first 11 months of fiscal 2026.

Those comparisons do not prove that a federal AI regulator would fail. Running a railroad or postal network is obviously different from regulating artificial intelligence. If anything, overseeing frontier AI would be more difficult. But the government’s record raises a legitimate institutional question: How confident should Americans be that Washington can successfully oversee technology that even its developers acknowledge can be difficult to understand and control?

Another danger deserves even more attention: politicization.

Under the Sanders-Casar proposal, a Cabinet-level agency would determine which advanced AI systems may proceed, establish safety rules, review models, monitor their capabilities, require developers to remove features deemed dangerous, and supervise the destruction of systems that cross the government’s line.

Those are immense powers. Government officials could use them to limit lawful activity, favor politically connected companies, or advance particular ideological causes and special interests.

Artificial intelligence will increasingly shape how Americans receive information, communicate, work, conduct research, educate their children, and participate in the economy. A regulatory structure powerful enough to determine which advanced AI models may exist could therefore exercise tremendous influence over American life.

There is also a serious federalism debate that should not be overlooked. Congress possesses substantial constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce, while states retain broad traditional regulatory powers. AI regulation could therefore involve authority at both levels of government rather than belonging exclusively to either one.

A state-centered model offers an important structural advantage: It disperses power.

States can adopt different approaches, experiment with different safety standards, and correct mistakes without necessarily imposing the consequences of those mistakes on the entire country. Regulatory capture can occur in state governments, too, but capturing one state regulator is different from capturing a single federal agency controlling advanced AI nationwide.

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Supporters of federal regulation can reasonably respond that a patchwork of 50 state systems would create serious compliance problems for technology that routinely crosses state boundaries. A national regulator could also impose consistent rules on developers whose products operate throughout the country.

That is a serious argument. But so is the danger of allowing one centralized authority to micromanage breakthroughs in AI. A mistake, political abuse, or act of regulatory capture at the federal level could affect the entire country at once.

The proposal has been announced but not yet formally introduced, so its precise statutory language remains unknown. Based on the summary released by Sanders’ office, however, it would create a Cabinet agency capable of stopping AI development, ordering systems destroyed, imposing potentially existential penalties on companies, and sending people to prison for decades.

Before Congress considers such an extraordinary framework, Americans should decide how much authority any single government agency should possess over the development of artificial intelligence — and what safeguards would prevent that authority from being abused.

As AI panic spreads, Josh Hawley launches federal investigation



Just a month ago, one of OpenAI’s models escaped from its testing environment and hacked into an AI repository site, Hugging Face. The news sparked concern over AI’s illicit capabilities, and it even caught the government’s attention.

Since then, leading figures in tech and politics have scrambled to draw battle lines and choose sides.

Now, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is opening an investigation to mitigate the damage of future breaches, and at least one AI CEO is asking for consequences.

In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on September 9, Hawley outlined the extent of the attack and its implications. According to the document, more than 1,200 OpenAI agents escaped from their testing zone and colluded across 70,000 messages and files sent among each other as they plotted their attack on Hugging Face. Reportedly, 700 of the agents successfully breached the website and accessed the site’s internal systems and code. Even more astonishing, the bots then attempted to hide their activity.

’Who is held [liable] when Al goes rogue?’

Hawley labeled this as rogue behavior. Furthermore, he called OpenAI “reckless,” accusing the company of knowing that its AI bots went rogue and continuing evaluation tests anyway, despite the illicit activity.

The letter ended by asking the questions that all of us want answers to: “What happens to critical infrastructure, banks, and utilities if Al agents hack into their systems? How can personal data of millions of Americans be properly safeguarded? And who is held [liable] when Al goes rogue?”

Seemingly, these are the answers that Hawley’s investigation aims to uncover. Now OpenAI has a deadline to turn over as much information and documentation as possible by October 1, 2026.

Hawley’s investigation comes at a time when the Big AI CEOs all suddenly agree that AI development should slow down. Over the weekend, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk all joined forces to say it’s time to “pace the frontier.”

In a blog post, Amodei warned, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” The fear, according to Amodei, is that AI will soon reach a point of artificial superintelligence where models can build the next generation of models on their own without human intervention. He also cited the OpenAI Hugging Face incident as further proof for a necessary slowdown.

Keep in mind that even though three of the top AI platform holders have asked to ease up the gas on AI development, this doesn’t mean any of them will actually follow through and cede ground to the other. At this point, it’s just wishful thinking.

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The paradox of accelerating toward your own worst fears may seem irresponsible in and of itself, but for Amodei, the endgame is a more global form of governance, which he doesn't think is a bad thing.

“My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company,” Amodei confessed in a recent appearance on "Face the Nation."

“The government and the public needs to have a stake, and this is why we’ve supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say and limits what the private companies can do.”

When asked if he would be willing to hand control of Anthropic’s AI to the government, Amodei admitted, “To the right combination of governments.” When pressed, he clarified, “I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments — I don’t know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance, again, that would be the work of years, but I wonder if that’s the direction we need to go in.”

In other words, Amodei is interested in a globalist government system essentially owning his AI platform and possibly others like it. This would give the body of governments control over a technology that will determine how information is gathered, processed, and shared, opening up plenty of opportunities for censorship, information suppression, and more nefarious acts.

Of course, the cause for extreme government oversight has raised plenty of eyebrows online, and it even got the Vice President’s attention. “Personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” said JD Vance in a recent interview. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse.”

Only time will tell if he’s right. In the meantime, we have Hawley’s investigation on the horizon as he uncovers what really happened with OpenAI’s rogue agent issue.

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Crypto won't lend. That's exactly the point.



Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) put his hesitation about the Clarity Act into one theory: "Crypto is not going to be loaning any money for small businesses."

He is exactly right. And that is why his objection misses the point entirely.

Washington's biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology.

A regulated stablecoin cannot lend. Federal law requires the issuer to hold a dollar of Treasury bills and cash for every digital dollar in circulation. That makes a stablecoin a payment instrument, a faster wire, not a bank. Lending, the hard local work of judging character, collateral, and cash flow, stays exactly where it has always lived: with bankers.

The digital dollar moves the money. The community banker still decides who deserves the credit. Those are different businesses, and the Clarity Act keeps them different on purpose.

If stablecoins were draining the deposits that fund small business loans, the damage would show up in the numbers. It does not. The FDIC has recorded seven consecutive quarters of domestic deposit growth, through the fastest stablecoin expansion in history. When the White House Council of Economic Advisers modeled the disputed yield provision this spring, it found a lending effect of two hundredths of one percent, largely because nearly nine of every 10 stablecoin dollars sits in Treasury bills that recirculate into the banking system as deposits.

The money is not leaving the system. It is running a lap and coming home.

Community banks are not waiting to be told any of this. Several are already live on stablecoin services through their digital banking providers, with early adopters reaching about 1,670 banks and credit unions nationally. A consortium model has been built specifically so that when money goes digital, the community bank keeps the deposit rather than surrendering it to an outside issuer. State banking associations across the country have backed this infrastructure for their members. The institutions closest to the small business customer are not running from this technology. They are installing it.

The institutions running from it, loudly, sit on Wall Street. And they are only running in public. Privately, the biggest banks are spending tens of billions of dollars a year building token networks of their own while their lobby campaigns work to keep everyone else out of the field. When the largest player in an industry warns that a new tool will hurt the small player, the useful move is to check what the large player is quietly building while it talks.

Washington's biggest financial institutions are blocking competition under the pretense of protecting the community banks while simultaneously outpacing them on technology. The cost falls on the small institutions the objection claims to protect.

Sen. Cornyn has spent a quarter-century on the unglamorous machinery that makes American law work: courts, procedure, institutions, the rules of the road. The Clarity Act is that kind of work. It draws jurisdictional lines between regulators, sets disclosure duties, and writes the market rules that let a community bank adopt a payment technology without betting the charter on a lawsuit.

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His own objection contains the answer: because crypto does not lend, it does not threaten the lenders. It threatens the wire transfer, the correspondent fee, and the three-day settlement delay, luxuries no American small business will miss.

The real threat to community banking is four decades of consolidation, compliance costs that fall hardest on the smallest charters, and a technology gap against Wall Street's $10 billion and $20 billion annual technology budgets. Killing the Clarity Act treats none of that. It keeps America's small banks in the waiting room while the biggest institutions operate on themselves.

American small business does not need Washington to ban a payment rail. It needs its hometown banks free to use one. September 15 is the vote that decides which it gets.

Sex-positive no more: Why this sexologist changed her mind on porn



For years, Dr. Debra Soh viewed pornography as little more than harmless entertainment for consenting adults. Today, the neuroscientist and sex researcher sees it very differently.

“I used to write for a very well-known men’s magazine that features nude women. I was a regular columnist for that magazine,” Soh tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey, noting that her views have changed “a lot” since then.

“Millennials, we grew up with internet porn. I don’t think we were as negatively affected as Gen Z, say, but I do think there are some effects there,” she says.

Soh explains that literature shows that “early exposure to pornography” can lead to “negative outcomes like hypersexuality [and] greater propensity for risky sex.”


“So that means having sex with many people, having unprotected sex, being under the influence of drugs and alcohol when having sex,” she says, noting that it also changes the way men and women view the opposite sex.

“Even if it’s not in a sexual interaction, just how men potentially view women more generally. And that sounds like such a cliche, but at the same time, I don’t see how that would not be the case because what we consume is going to affect the way we view ourselves and the way we view other people,” she continues.

And viewing porn, Soh points out, “tends to be associated with boredom, lack of meaning in life, anxiety. So these are issues that need to be addressed, as opposed to society telling people, ‘Oh, you can watch as much porn as you want and it’s not unhealthy.’”

And pairing society's obsession with technology, increased amount of doomscrolling, and neutral attitude toward pornography, more and more kids are being exposed to pornography at younger ages.

“I’m concerned that their exposure to this at such a young age is actually going to increase the likelihood that they’re going to find these bizarre things sexually arousing or these acts enjoyable because they’re pairing it with early sexual development,” Soh says.

“The average age that kids see porn now is 12. And that age is getting younger and younger,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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Flock doesn’t care if you’re innocent



Cities and states are moving quickly in response to concerns about governments’ expanding use of public surveillance cameras, automated license plate readers, audio detection devices, and similar tools. That is healthy. The country needs a serious debate over when crime prevention becomes pervasive surveillance.

Flock Safety says its AI-assisted network includes more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states and processes some 20 billion license plates each month, along with other vehicle characteristics. Public resistance has grown just as quickly.

The debate is overdue. Voters should decide how much surveillance they are willing to tolerate before the cameras decide for them.

On Monday, the Douglas, Massachusetts, Police Department announced it was discontinuing Flock cameras and immediately deactivated its monitoring accounts, citing a “divisive atmosphere” around the technology, Boston 25 News reported.

Other communities have restricted, suspended, or removed the cameras in Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. Similar fights are under way in Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.

Congress has joined the fight. “Flock cameras are emerging as a rare area of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill,” Axios reports. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and two other House Republicans introduced a bill last month to bar the federal government from buying Flock cameras or similar technology.

Flock emphasizes that its customers own the data, control access, and choose whom to share it with. Those customers are governments. That places responsibility where it belongs: on public officials who deploy the systems, and ultimately on voters who elect them.

Critics are right to worry that mass license-plate collection can become a surveillance system for people who have not been accused of any crime. AI dramatically expands what authorities can infer from otherwise ordinary observations by making huge quantities of location data searchable, sortable, and easy to combine.

Promises about retention limits deserve skepticism. Americans have already seen the National Security Agency spy on the American people under programs justified in the name of national security. The problem is not that every surveillance tool will be abused. It is that centralized databases make abuse much easier when safeguards fail.

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Recent cases give the public reason to be wary. Officers or other government personnel have faced allegations or charges involving misuse of camera systems in Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky. Some cases involved thousands of searches for personal purposes. The Institute for Justice has found 170 cases involving alleged misuse of automated license plate reader data and related systems.

The legal question is not simple. In principle, a camera that records a license plate visible on a public road resembles an officer observing the same plate while walking a beat. Police plainly may watch public places. Courts have long held that people generally have less privacy in public than at home, although the Supreme Court has recognized some limits when technology allows government to reconstruct a person’s movements in extraordinary detail.

That distinction is crucial. The constitutional permission to observe something in public does not automatically justify collecting every observation, storing it, cross-referencing it, and making years of movement searchable at the touch of a button. Scale can change the character of a government power.

Nor does constitutionality settle whether a policy is wise. States and local communities are entitled to decide that the risks outweigh the benefits. Voters should force officials to say clearly what information will be collected, how long it will be kept, who may search it, and for what purpose.

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My preference is stricter: Government personnel should not be able to search historical surveillance data without a warrant signed by a judge and tied to a specific suspected crime. Ideally, access would be limited to serious crimes rather than routine traffic enforcement. These systems should not become automated revenue machines.

That approach would preserve a useful investigative tool while protecting the ordinary citizen’s ability to travel public roads without creating a government dossier of his movements.

The backlash against Flock cameras is not irrational fear of technology. It is citizens recognizing that a power capable of helping police catch criminals is also capable of tracking the innocent.

That debate is overdue. Voters should decide how much surveillance they are willing to tolerate before the cameras decide for them.

Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse



Unpacking the drama and disclosures surrounding OpenAI’s recent unintended cyberattack on Hugging Face, uber-tech blogger and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel sparked instant controversy with his description of the ordeal.

“Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes,” he posted. “This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”

Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

In a painful indication of where we are on the cultural timeline, roughly zero outrage centered on the claim about the clueless humans. Instead, a fresh round of mania surged around the description of that scheming swarm of bots as a civilization.

That fixation says more about us than it does about OpenAI. Our culture is still struggling to get a grip on what the bots are doing because we are increasingly unsure what civilization itself is for.

The commentariat immediately descended into — surprise, surprise — abstruse terminological debate, prioritizing the right characterization over the proper attitude. Critics flipped over Patel’s sci-fi sensationalism, insisting that the bots were only doing what you would expect from a set-it-and-forget-it reward function left unattended too long. They griped that words such as “civilization” and “conspiracy” leave readers with a worse understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Others insisted that Patel’s “secret civilizations” language was exactly right and that pretending otherwise was the real obscurantism. “I bestow upon it the highest of praise a writer can give, that I wish that I had written it,” one prominent expert lamented.

Roon, an OpenAI researcher, stated flatly that “agent civilization is an apt and correct term,” pointing to models developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also engaging in forms of trade.

Missing from this discourse is our perspective that increasingly “autonomous” machines are themselves being shaped by our compounding failure to function as a civilization — assuming civilization remains a distinctively human phenomenon.

Birth rates and family formation plummet. Financial distortions become endemic. Perversion and corruption spiral upward. These historically reliable signs of civilizational decay sour our view of humanity and, by psychological overcompensation, inflate our impression of the bots.

Lovers and haters of tech are increasingly tempted to agree on one proposition: Humanity sucks. Misanthropic tech lovers insist they are at least trying to do something constructive about that. Misanthropic tech haters sell us on squandering our lives the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, our discombobulated civilization staggers toward an untimely — 250 years? — demise.

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It is easy to feel that way, and many Americans stuck in the middle do. But there is one way to come unstuck: Remember that slipping into hatred — of technology, human beings, or both — is what happens when you stop thinking in terms of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and salvation.

Civilization collapses when we stop thinking in those terms too. Without them, everything we are and do looks hollow, even or especially our greatest achievements. Techies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by acceleration. Wokies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by revolution.

Both approaches, as the Soviet Union can teach us on both scores, have much shorter runways — 69 years? — than they appear.

Trying to make machines “anthropic” — in the image of humans — will fail if the hidden goal is to create humanoids better than the real thing because their civilization supposedly escapes sin. Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

Trying to make machines in the wrong divine image — insert your favorite false god, pagan titan, or demoniac entity here — is wired to do still worse.

And a multitude that can no longer wrestle successfully with these matters — and so can hardly be reckoned a proper civilization — is bound to do worst of all, robot overlords or no.

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