Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan called Tuesday for a ban on superintelligent artificial intelligence. He wants a cabinet-level agency to regulate the industry. "This is the existential crisis of our time," he said. Many voters worry about these risks, and he hopes his new platform gets ahead of his opponent.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan is the first Democrat running in a battleground Senate race to publicly call for a pause on artificial intelligence development.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, called Tuesday for a ban on superintelligent artificial intelligence and a cabinet-level agency to regulate the fast-developing A.I. industry.
He also called for a ban on so-called recursive self-improvement, the process through which A.I. itself is used to develop more sophisticated A.I. models. Dr. El-Sayed's proposals, part of a broad expansion of his platform on A.I., arrive as the technology has become a pressing issue in midterm races, particularly in the Midwest, which has had an A.I. data center boom.
Dr. El-Sayed, a progressive, is the only Democrat running in one of the country's most competitive Senate races who has publicly called for a pause on A.I. development or outlined a comprehensive policy program to regulate it. In an interview, he said that voters regularly expressed concerns to him about A.I., and that neither party was sufficiently focused on it.
"I understand that there's a lot of money being sloshed around by A.I. super PACs, but this is the existential crisis of our time," Dr. El-Sayed said. "If we don't act quickly, we may get to a point at which we cannot act because it's too late."
His opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican, has warned that A.I. presents a national security threat. Mr. Rogers, unlike other Republican Senate candidates, has vowed to make regulation a priority if elected, breaking with President Trump, who opposes any guardrails. But Mr. Rogers has not released an A.I. policy platform, and Dr. El-Sayed has worked to get ahead of him on the issue. In recent polling by The New York Times and Siena University, Dr. El-Sayed held an 11-point edge over Mr. Rogers in a question about who would be better on A.I. data centers.
A.I. burst onto the midterm stage about a month ago, when A.I. researchers issued dire warnings about how the technology could pose a potentially existential threat, and as industry executives called for a slowdown in development. One top executive, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, said he worried that A.I. might take over the internet within the next year.
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