U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders urged leading figures in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector to pause the technology's development and warned that lawmakers will intervene if no action is taken.

"For the good of humanity, keep your word. Stop the development of AI. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control," the Democratic politician wrote in a letter addressed to Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta*).

Sanders pledged to intervene through legislative means if his demands are not met. "At a time when we have witnessed the loss of human control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies continue to move full speed ahead, investing tens of billions of dollars in a technology that no one is able to fully understand, predict, or control (...) I want to make this very clear: if you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I will do so in the United States Senate," he added in the letter.

The request comes amid news of cyberattacks carried out by the most advanced AI models. Notably, an OpenAI model autonomously breached the systems of Hugging Face, a platform specializing in machine learning. As a result, the company halted development of its new model, Astra, which was involved in the incident.