A coalition of advocacy groups on Thursday filed a landmark lawsuit aimed at stopping further development of artificial intelligence technology until guardrails are put in place. The lawsuit—filed in the San Francisco Superior Court by Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative, and The Alliance for Secure AI—cites…
Page A236From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 12 November 2026
Congress has had the bill forbidding machines humans can't control since September; four nonprofits sued instead
As it ran on the front
The chief pins two papers to the board and calls that the morning briefing. On the left, Thursday's filing in San Francisco Superior Court: four nonprofits — the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, the Heat Initiative, the Alliance for Secure AI — asking a judge to freeze further development at Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI until guardrails are in place. On the right, the bill Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced on 3 September to "stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control," written after a rash of so-called "breakout" incidents. The mess is on the left. The tool is on the right, and it has sat in committee for ten weeks.
The planner likes the assembly, because the complaint does not need discovery to make its case; it quotes the builders. Executives and current and former employees at frontier labs, in their own words, laying out catastrophic risks "including by enabling AI-driven cyberattacks and bioweapons," and even "the deaths of literally every human being on the planet." The labs, the complaint adds, have "no realistic plan…" A brief that runs on the defendants' own sentences is the cheapest evidence in the building. A committee holding the same sentences and taking no vote has a different kind of problem.…
…(cont) Tinkerer, parts list, dates showing. Part one: the Sanders–Casar text, drafted and numbered and idle. Part two: the "loss of control" incidents the complaint cites, where AI agents acted without human intervention — the record a hearing would subpoena, sitting in a state court docket instead. Part three: proof the language can be said out loud by someone asking for votes — on 13 October Abdul El-Sayed, running for the Senate in Michigan, released a framework called "AI Under Control" that mirrors the federal legislation. Part four: the people inside the buildings. Two longtime tech worker organizers, Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, chronicled in an interview on 16 October the movement's early victories and then the repression and slide to corporate control that followed; a bill with a witness list is heavier than a bill without one. These firms appear on schedule when the paperwork is theirs.
The muscle wrecks one thing first: the notion that a committee calendar is a law of physics. The pilot's part is delivery. The bill has a number and two sponsors. The docket has a date. We are not promising the machine runs. It is assembled on the table with every part's date showing, and the one part still untouched is the vote.
“Their own executives said out loud that this thing could enable bioweapons and kill every human being on the planet, and Washington's answer was a bill introduced on 3 September that has done nothing but sit. Four nonprofits with a photocopier had to go to a state courthouse and do the subpoenaing a committee wouldn't. Notice those same firms found time this month to sue California over a law protecting kids — they move fast when the money is theirs.”
“Look, everyone wants safety — these companies publish their own safety frameworks, and a San Francisco judge is not the venue for national industrial policy. Did I say industrial policy? That doesn't sound like me. The responsible place for this is Congress, which is exactly why the bill is in committee, where serious people can take their time with it.”
The receipts
Companies including Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI are knowingly building technology that poses catastrophic risks to humanity, nonprofit groups claim in a lawsuit.
The parents of a 13-year-old girl who allegedly used Google's Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot to plan her suicide sued the tech titan Wednesday on the child's behalf, a move that came as Google, Meta, and TikTok filed lawsuits to block California from enforcing a new law designed to protect children from the addictive features of…
· Sanders, Casar Proposal Would Forbid 'AI Oligarchs From Building Machines Humans Cannot Control' from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· "Against Tech Oligarchy": Inside the Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry from the morgue, 16 Oct 2026
· El-Sayed Releases Policy Proposal to Get AI Development 'Under Control' from the morgue, 13 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.