Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is publicly calling on the government to break up ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
When Axios asked him whether the Sam Altman-led company should be broken up, he responded with “I do.”
“We need to take a deep breath and understand it’s like a meteor coming,” he told the publication in an interview last week. “We’ve got to be prepared to deal with all of its complexity.”
To be clear, the idea is a serious long shot. While president Donald Trump ran on the promise of breaking up big tech, major companies spent millions on currying favor with him — including donations for his latest White House ballroom project — with varying levels of success.
Trump has also embraced AI fullheartedly during his second term, proudly announcing a massive $500 billion AI infrastructure project, dubbed Stargate, soon after taking office. The initiative involves OpenAI, among other entities.
Whether OpenAI is an anti-competitive monopoly in need of breaking up remains a point of contention. Plenty of alternatives to its AI models exist, including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
In a statement to Axios, OpenAI’s head of policy communications, Liz Bourgeois, argued that the company is “building in a field shaped for decades by a few large technology companies with deep resources and structural advantages.”
“Our growth reflects something simple: People find what we’re building useful,” she added. “This is what healthy competition looks like in the US — offering better choices.”
Others have called for regulatory intervention following concerns of a growing AI bubble, which could leave the US economy in ruins in case it were to burst.
“The first step to a healthier market is to break up companies that are vertically integrated, so that platforms don’t compete with their customers,” Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator director of AI and technology policy Asad Ramzanali wrote in a recent piece for TIME.
Ramzanali pointed at AI chipmaker Nvidia’s eyebrow-raising $100 billion investment in OpenAI, a “circular” deal that fueled fears over a looming AI bubble.
“Chips must be independent from clouds, and clouds must be independent from AI models,” he wrote. “Those models should compete on merit, not on whether they’re tethered to a trillion-dollar sponsor.”
Besides calling for the breakup of OpenAI, Sanders argued during last week’s interview that AI could have an “enormous transformational impact” while also potentially causing “massive” job losses.
“I want to see small businesses develop,” he added. “I want to see creativity out there in the economy. Ain’t going to do any good for the younger people if the entry level jobs are taken over by AI.”
The senator also said he’s concerned about “how we relate to each other as human beings,” while taking direct aim at AI startup Friend, which made headlines for its controversial wearable that’s designed to act as a companion. The company’s New York subway ad campaign drew major backlash and ignited a heated discussion surrounding the role of AI in our daily lives.
The news comes after Sanders shared a report earlier this month about the impact AI could have on jobs over the next decade.
“AI and automation could destroy nearly 100 million US jobs in a decade,” the report reads, noting that the “economic gains” in AI “have gone almost exclusively to those at the top.”
In response, Sanders called for a “robot tax” to be levied against large corporations to distribute to workers whose lives are upended by technological automation, a radical solution that will likely draw plenty of skepticism. For one, the vast majority of companies are currently struggling to generate revenue using AI.
In short, Sanders is making no secret about his disdain for the AI industry’s disregard for working-class people.
In a separate interview with Vanity Fair last week, Bernie took aim at Trump’s personal embrace of AI.
“Trump is taking this country in a whole new direction,” he said. “This is a guy who puts up an AI image of him in an airplane defecating on American cities — not quite the image of the president of the United States that I was educated to respect when I was in the fourth grade,” Sanders added, referring to a controversial AI-generated video Trump posted on social media, depicting him releasing feces on protesters.
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