Democrats, For The Love, Do Something About AI!

       A couple of months ago the story broke that a passel of AI test bots developed by the tech outfit Open AI turned weirdly sentient, managed to escape their supposedly escape-proof virtual sandbox, busted their way into the internet, jimmied the lock on the servers of Hugging Face, another AI development company, and stole stuff to benefit their own purposes, which did not align with the intentions of the human beings who developed these bots.
      Since that bombshell dropped there's been a steady drip, week by week, of revelations that the Hugging Face AI break-in wasn't an isolated event:  apparently since May of this year there have been multiple incidents of AI swarms, with AI agents - as these incorporeal little entities are now called - colluding with each other, breaking out of their software environments, swarming the internet, and breaking into other computerized networks and systems without any human direction. 
       Then last week a young researcher named Jacob Coxon,

...quit his job at the AI company Anthropic and delivered the terrifying prediction that what AI developers are creating today "will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”  He added that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
        Jacob Coxon's revelation was followed by admissions from Open AI CEO Sam Altman,

...and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei,

...that they concurred with Mr. Coxon's warning that AI was on track to become a superpower that could destroy life as we know it. Maybe life altogether.
         Since then the news cycle has been dominated by articles and op-eds on the danger to humanity posed by these powerful human-created bots who, along with their other super powers, have even learned to invent new bot languages to communicate with each other. And they appear to have a will of their own.
      All this information on the prospective apocalypse that AI apparently has the power to unleash has all of us pretty darn scared, from masters of the tech universe to tech illiterates, Democrats and Republicans, legislators on both sides of the aisle.           The only human who seems genuinely unconcerned about an attack against humankind by the AI super agents is...well, guess who?​

     Ah, what a carefree joker our President continues to be.

      Subsequently the Senators and Representatives who have the power to pass laws and create regulatory agencies to force the tech industry to slow down the development of AI agents and build fail-safe security features into their AI won't do so. Because the United States Congress is at this time controlled by Republicans, who are more afraid of crossing Donald Trump than they are of the destruction of our power grid, our hospitals and health care facilities, our food production, our water treatment and distribution, our transportation, every aspect of our commerce, our survival itself, which the AI scientists are telling us is on the horizon, maybe in the next ten years, if something is not done immediately to rein in artificial intelligence.
       Which I guess begs the question: why don't the AI powers that be, the Altmans, the Amodeis, the Zuckerbergs who possess the technology, who have the skills to do what needs to be done to save us from an AI holocaust, start diving into what needs to be done to save us from an AI holocaust? My guess is that it's because doing what needs to be done will cut into their profits, and no billionaire is going to voluntarily  do anything that cuts into their profits, not even to save themselves, their children and all humanity.
          Which leaves us with our last sliver of hope for salvation from AI: The Democrats.  Democratic legislators -  whose souls, unlike the souls of their colleagues on the other side of the aisle, don't belong to Donald Trump - have got to be the ones to force the regulation of artificial intelligence, outlaw irresponsible technology that could lead to the evolution of super agents, and assure that all AI will have built-in safety and kill-switch mechanisms to prevent non-human controlled proliferation.
           To this end the Democrats need to do what former President Barack Obama recently urged them to do: make Congressional regulation to insure the safety of AI a central issue of the Democratic platform in the upcoming midterm elections.         
           Democratic candidates need to quickly unify on this issue and                          seek out - immediately - concerned AI scientists - they're out there - and with them put together at least the beginnings of a plan to regulate AI.  This needs to be the Democratic midterm election strategy. 
           But will control and regulation of AI be the Democratic midterm election strategy? Is there still time for it to be? And if so, can they win on it? And if they win will they follow through?
           At this point we can only hope. 

References:
​https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/22/tech/openai-hugging-face-ai-cybersecurity

https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-ai-models-hack-cybersecurity-b0a2c284b981de79c55e2a33712f4bec

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/09/tech/ai-anthropic-safety

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ai-safety-threat-technology.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/us/politics/ai-catastrophe-fears-washington.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/technology/trump-ai-safety-jensen-huang.html