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.
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