While Washington’s breakup with Anthropic exposed the complete lack of any coherent rules governing artificial intelligence, a bipartisan coalition of thinkers has assembled something the government has so far declined to produce: a framework for what responsible AI development should actually look like.
The Pro-Human Declaration was finalized before last week’s Pentagon-Anthropic standoff, but the collision of the two events wasn’t lost on anyone involved.
“There’s something quite remarkable that has happened in America just in the last four months,” said Max Tegmark, the MIT physicist and AI researcher who helped organize the effort, in conversation with this editor. “Polling suddenly [is showing] that 95% of all Americans oppose an unregulated race to superintelligence.”
The newly published document, signed by hundreds of experts, former officials, and public figures, opens with the no-nonsense observation that humanity is at a fork in the road. One path, which the declaration calls “the race to replace,” leads to humans being supplanted first as workers, then as decision-makers, as power accrues to unaccountable institutions and their machines. The other leads to AI that massively expands human potential.
The latter scenario depends on five key pillars: keeping humans in charge, avoiding the concentration of power, protecting the human experience, preserving individual liberty, and holding AI companies legally accountable. Among its more muscular provisions is an outright prohibition on superintelligence development until there’s scientific consensus it can be done safely and genuine democratic buy-in; mandatory off-switches on powerful systems; and a ban on architectures that are capable of self-replication, autonomous self-improvement, or resistance to shutdown.
The declaration’s release coincides with a period that makes its urgency far easier to appreciate. On the last Friday in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic — whose AI already runs on classified military platforms — a “supply chain risk” after the company refused to grant the Pentagon unlimited use of its technology, a label ordinarily reserved for firms with ties to China. Hours later, OpenAI cut its own deal with the Defense Department, one that legal experts say will be difficult to enforce in any meaningful way. What it all laid bare is how costly Congressional inaction on AI has become.
As Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, told The New York Times afterward, “This is not just some dispute over a contract. This is the first conversation we have had as a country about control over AI systems.”
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