Washington and Anthropic: The Pro-Human Declaration Takes Hold

The recent rift between Washington and Anthropic has highlighted the lack of clear regulations regarding artificial intelligence. In response to this gap, a bipartisan coalition has developed the Pro-Human Declaration, a framework for responsible AI development that the U.S. government has yet to produce.

The Pro-Human Declaration was finalized ahead of the face-to-face meeting between the Pentagon and Anthropic last week, but the collision of the two events did not go unnoticed by those involved. Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT and AI researcher, emphasized during a conversation that 95% of Americans oppose an unregulated race toward superintelligence. The document, signed by hundreds of experts, former officials, and public figures, begins with the pragmatic observation that humanity stands at a crossroads.

One path, which the declaration calls “the race to replace,” leads to humans being replaced first as workers and then as decision-makers, as power accumulates in the hands of unaccountable institutions and their machines. The other path leads to an AI that massively expands human potential.

The Five Pillars of the Declaration

This latter scenario rests on five key pillars: keeping humans in control, avoiding the concentration of power, protecting human experience, preserving individual freedom, and holding AI companies legally accountable. Among its firmest provisions are a total ban on the development of superintelligence until a scientific consensus establishes that it can be achieved safely and with genuine democratic support; mandatory kill switches on powerful systems; and a prohibition on architectures capable of self-replication, autonomous improvement, or resistance to shutdown.

Current Context and Issues

The publication of the declaration coincides with a period that makes its urgency much easier to appreciate. On the last Friday of February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled Anthropic — whose AI is already operating on classified military platforms — as a “supply chain risk” after the company refused to grant the Pentagon unlimited access to its technology, a label typically reserved for companies with ties to China. A few hours later, OpenAI struck its own deal with the Department of Defense, an agreement that legal experts find difficult to enforce meaningfully. All of this has highlighted the cost of Congress's inaction on AI.

As Dean Ball, a senior researcher at the Foundation for American Innovation, stated to the New York Times afterward: “This is not just a contract dispute. This is the first conversation we’ve had as a country about controlling AI systems.”

Child Safety as Leverage

Tegmark used an analogy that most people can understand during our interview. “You never have to worry that a pharmaceutical company will release another drug that causes massive harm before people understand how to make it safe,” he said, “because the FDA won’t let them release anything until it’s safe enough.”

Territorial wars in Washington rarely generate the public pressure capable of changing laws. Instead, Tegmark sees child safety as the pressure point most likely to break the current deadlock. Indeed, the declaration calls for mandatory testing before the deployment of AI products — particularly chatbots and companion applications aimed at young users — covering risks such as increased suicidal ideation, worsening mental health issues, and emotional manipulation.

“If a creepy man texts an 11-year-old pretending to be a young girl and tries to persuade that boy to commit suicide, that man can go to prison for that,” Tegmark said. “We already have laws. It’s illegal. So why is it different if a machine does it?”

He believes that once the principle of pre-release testing is established for products aimed at children, the scope will almost inevitably expand. “People will come and say — let’s add a few more requirements. Maybe we should also test that this can’t help terrorists make biological weapons. Maybe we should test to ensure that superintelligence doesn’t have the capability to overthrow the U.S. government.”

It is not insignificant that former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Susan Rice, the former domestic policy advisor in the Obama administration, have both expressed their support for this declaration.