Bernie Sanders uses AI to denounce AI itself
Bernie Sanders uses AI to denounce AI itself – El Sol de México | News, Sports, Gossip, Columns
The American turned a conversation with Artificial Intelligence Claude into a warning about massive data collection and the risks of data centers.
The independent senator from Vermont posted a video in which he dialogues with Claude, Anthropic’s assistant, to talk about privacy, user profiling, and the political use of personal data.
The conversation, which was disseminated on social networks, was designed as a denunciation against large tech companies and as a way to amplify his proposal to temporarily halt the expansion of AI infrastructure.
Personal data has become a profitable asset because it allows companies to directly impact consumer decisions.
Sanders defended the urgency of regulating artificial intelligence, warning that its advance is historic and surpasses the current capacity of Congress.
What are technological care and why do they concern us all?
The project behind that legislative maneuver is called Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Center Moratorium Act, and was presented by Sanders, along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on March 25. The initiative proposes a federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers, until there are solid national safeguards in environmental, labor, and security matters.
In the public version of the announcement, Sanders warned that the pace of AI advancement is so rapid that Congress is ‘far behind’ what it should understand about its effects, and emphasized that it cannot be allowed for a few tech oligarchs to decide the future of the economy and democracy.
The conversation with Claude was not an improvised exchange. The video, around nine minutes long, was published on Sanders’ channel and had a calculated staging: dark lighting, solemn tone, and music that reinforced the gravity of the message. In the dialogue, Sanders first frames the problem and says that he has been analyzing the impact of AI on American society in terms of job loss, mental health, and political process; then he concentrates the interview on privacy.
Claude responds that what would probably surprise most Americans is the volume of data collected: browsing history, location, purchases, searches, and even the time a person stays on a website. That information, he explains, is then entered into AI systems that create extremely detailed profiles about each user.
One of the most striking points of the exchange is that Claude does not limit himself to describing data collection; he also explains what it is used for. When Sanders asks what the goal of that massive accumulation of information is, the answer is direct: money. The AI states that companies convert that data into valuable information for advertisers and other commercial actors, who pay for access to detailed profiles because they are effective in influencing consumer behavior.
The dialogue also enters political territory. Claude claims that the same mechanisms that track consumption habits can be used in election campaigns to identify which messages persuade each voter best. In that logic, data intermediaries buy and sell information about millions of citizens without them fully knowing. The model ends with an idea that concentrates the spirit of the conversation: privacy is not just an individual matter, but a democratic matter. According to his response, the massive accumulation of data gives companies and governments significant power to influence the behavior and decisions of the population.
