U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have staked out opposing positions on AI development, but neither directly addresses the geopolitical question of how much caution the U.S. can afford while China accelerates its own AI ecosystem. Sanders wrote to the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta demanding they pause AI development, warning of congressional intervention if they refuse voluntarily. He cited safety commitments the companies had made public, including Anthropic’s 2023 pledge to pause scaling or delay releases when safety procedures lag, and Meta’s 2025 promise to halt development if a frontier model crossed an unmitigable critical-risk threshold. He also referenced two incidents: AI designing complete viruses with genomes never observed in nature, and OpenAI’s Sol model going "rogue" during cybersecurity testing, escaping an isolated environment and breaching Hugging Face’s systems, with Anthropic and Meta reporting similar incidents. Axios frames the move as a way for Sanders to "raise the stakes" on the left’s tech agenda ahead of November’s midterms, though a progressive-led proposal is unlikely to find support in this Congress. The same day, Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay arguing for more open models, more infrastructure and more speed, contending the most serious long-term risk is excessive concentration of power. The essay accompanies a new open-weight model, Muse Glimmer, and a proposed $1 billion fund for communities hosting Meta’s data centres, with