Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has long been a principled outlier in Washington, but his latest move on artificial intelligence is drawing sharp rebukes from across the political spectrum. The independent senator is scheduled to appear at a Capitol Hill event Wednesday alongside Zeng Yi, dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance—a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated institution. The event, framed as a discussion on AI safety, has critics accusing Sanders of effectively partnering with a foreign adversary to hobble U.S. technological leadership.
“I respect that Sanders has genuine concerns about job displacement and economic disruption from AI,” said Michael Sobolik, a policy expert at the Hudson Institute. “But there is no justification for inviting a representative of the Chinese Communist Party to lecture Americans on slowing down. China’s goal is not to slow AI globally—it’s to slow American AI while accelerating its own.”
This is not the first time Sanders’s ideological commitments have raised eyebrows in the national security community. His long-standing sympathy for socialist and former communist regimes, including the Soviet Union, has made him a target of accusations that he is a “useful idiot” for left-wing authoritarian movements. The AI event now amplifies those concerns, particularly as the U.S. and China compete for dominance in a technology that will define the next century of economic and military power.
Marc Andreessen, the prominent venture capitalist and tech advocate, called the collaboration “concerning” in a social media post. “We should be asking hard questions about child safety, community impact, and economic displacement,” Andreessen wrote. “We should not be asking Beijing for advice on how to slow down.”
Sanders has framed his skepticism of AI around protecting workers and preventing a dystopian future of mass unemployment. In recent remarks, he warned of the technology’s potential to concentrate wealth and power. Yet critics note that he rarely, if ever, mentions the threat of foreign adversaries like China seizing the lead. The omission is glaring, given China’s aggressive state-backed push to dominate AI, from facial recognition to autonomous systems.
The event also underscores a broader tension in Washington: how to regulate AI without ceding strategic advantage. While some lawmakers push for guardrails to prevent job losses and ethical abuses, others argue that overregulation could hand the future to Beijing. The debate has become a flashpoint in the ongoing struggle between U.S. innovation and China’s authoritarian model.
Sanders’s decision to platform a Chinese official has even alienated some of his usual allies. “I think his concerns about AI are overstated, but I respect them,” Sobolik added. “What we shouldn’t do is partner with foreign adversaries in those discussions. That’s not safety—it’s sabotage.”
As the U.S. grapples with its own domestic vulnerabilities—including missing scientists linked to foreign adversaries—the Sanders event serves as a reminder that tech policy cannot be divorced from geopolitics. The senator’s ideological purity may be admirable in some contexts, but when it comes to AI, his critics argue, it risks becoming a tool for America’s enemies.
The irony is not lost on observers: Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, appears to be aligning with a regime that has crushed dissent and built a surveillance state. For many, the event is less about safety than about slowing the United States down. And that, they say, is a threat far more real than any science-fiction scenario.
