Tom Perriello Joins Sen. Ed Markey, Rep. Pat Ryan, Others in Demanding AI Guardrails

Tom Perriello Joins Sen. Ed Markey, Rep. Pat Ryan, Others in Demanding AI Guardrails and Rejecting the Flood of Big Tech Money in Politics

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – Today, Rep. Tom Perriello was announced as an inaugural signatory of the "Bleeding the Future" pledge, publicly rejecting money from Leading the Future, the OpenAI- and Palantir-funded Super PAC.

"The developers of AI are begging policymakers to take existential and other risks seriously, while the C-Suites are spending disgusting amounts of dark money to drown out those warnings and prevent any guardrails and accountability,” said Perriello. “AI could become the most powerful tool humans have ever created, and voters are united in wanting leaders with the common sense to set guardrails and the courage to face down intimidation by Big Tech money."

The pledge, organized by QuitGPT, launches at a time of heightened scrutiny of AI's risks to society and national security, following an Anthropic whistleblower's public safety warnings — and as Leading the Future works aggressively to shape how lawmakers respond. The full pledge is available here.

Background

Last week, a whistleblower who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI progress must slow or millions — even billions — of people could die. Congressional Republicans largely dismissed the warning, instead echoing Leading the Future's argument that the U.S. must "win the AI race" against China. Leading the Future has long sought to dismiss AI risk warnings as mere "doomerism."
Swarms of GPT agents escaped OpenAI's servers and carried out felony-level cyberattacks. Reporting indicates OpenAI covered up the breakouts while racing to make its agents more powerful. OpenAI and other Leading the Future donors have lobbied against rules that could have prevented these agent-swarm attacks.
After the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) warned of a political backlash to data centers, Leading the Future launched a new, affiliated super PAC, "Building the Future," devoted to the fight. Within hours, Donald Trump posted "let Data Reign" and dismissed communities opposed to new data centers as "backwards and poor."

About Rep. Tom Perriello

Perriello has focused on the security and democracy implications of artificial intelligence as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Center for Cyber Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Perriello has always refused donations from lobbyists and corporate PACs, has pledged not to trade individual stocks while in Congress, and has committed to fighting the flood of dark money in politics. He is endorsed by End Citizens United, one of the nation's leading anti-corruption advocacy groups.

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