WASHINGTON — Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders do not agree on much. On Monday, they agreed that Silicon Valley has too much power and too little supervision.
At a Washington event billed as a cross-ideological reckoning, the two men shared a stage with religious leaders, parents, and artists to demand federal guardrails on artificial intelligence, per reporting from The New York Times. The coalition's specifics were thin — no bill number, no agency proposal — but the symbolism was not: when a MAGA populist and a democratic socialist share applause lines about "oligarchs," the industry's usual defense, that critics are confined to one political tribe, stops working.
Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg was busy picking a fight closer to home. On social media, Meta's chief executive suggested that rival labs — Anthropic went unnamed but was unmistakably implied — should devote more energy to safety and less to capability races, a curious position from a company that has spent 2026 aggressively courting AI researchers with nine-figure pay packages. The exchange, detailed by the Times, is the latest skirmish in what has become a genteel proxy war among frontier labs over who gets to define "responsible" AI — a term that increasingly means whatever the speaker's roadmap allows.
The timing is not incidental. Hours earlier, the Senate blocked the Clarity Act, a crypto market-structure bill years in the making, after Democrats cited concerns over President Trump's personal crypto holdings. Two industries, one Capitol: both now facing bipartisan skepticism that was unthinkable three years ago, when "innovation" was still a bipartisan applause line rather than a partisan liability.
None of this produces legislation. The Bannon-Sanders event yielded no markup, no committee referral. Zuckerberg's post yielded no policy change at Meta. But the accumulation matters: AI oligarchs, as Monday's speakers called them, are now a target from both flanks — and increasingly, from each other.
