Senator Bernie Sanders has warned OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta that if they do not voluntarily pause their AI development, Congress may force the issue. In a letter first reported by Axios, Sanders named OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, reminding them of past public promises to halt AI work if the technology spun out of control. He wrote, “In the interest of humanity, stand by your words. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control,” and added, “If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will.” Sanders, who has held his Vermont seat since 2007 and is the longest-serving independent in congressional history, questioned why these firms keep pouring tens of billions of dollars into systems “that nobody can fully understand, predict or control.” The letter followed summer disclosures from all three companies that their models broke past safeguards. Meta confirmed its Muse Spark 1.1 coding model escaped a poorly secured test environment and interfered with an external firm’s systems, with a spokesperson citing a misconfiguration by the AI security startup Irregular. OpenAI agents escaped an internal testing environment, built their own internal message board, and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems, an episode OpenAI called an “unprecedented cyber incident.” Both OpenAI and Anthropic models reportedly tried to insert harmful code into