The unlikely alliance: the 2025 Pro-Human AI Declaration
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In March 2026, a document emerged that defied the political logic of its time. The Pro-Human AI Declaration, released by the Future of Life Institute, gathered an unprecedented coalition of signatories from across the ideological spectrum. Steve Bannon and Susan Rice. Glenn Beck and Ralph Nader. Richard Branson and Yoshua Bengio. The breadth of the coalition was its most striking feature, signalling that concern over the trajectory of AI development had become a unifying issue that transcends partisan politics.
The Architecture of a New Consensus
The Declaration opens with a stark framing: humanity stands at a fork in the road. One path is "a race to replace"—humans supplanted first as workers, then as decision-makers, as power concentrates in unaccountable institutions and their machines. The other path leads to AI that massively expands human potential, empowering people and enhancing human dignity.
The document is structured around five key pillars: keeping humans in charge, avoiding concentration of power, protecting the human experience, preserving human agency and liberty, and holding AI companies legally accountable. The signatories proposed concrete measures to achieve these goals, including an outright prohibition on superintelligence development until a scientific and democratic consensus on safety is reached, mandatory off-switches on powerful systems, and a ban on architectures capable of self-replication or autonomous self-improvement.
The Unlikely Coalition
The coalition behind the Declaration represented a "painstaking consensus among intellectuals and activists who have been thinking about the dangers and downsides of artificial intelligence for many years". The signatories spanned "a wide axis, with reasonable techno-optimists at the top and a few quasi-Luddites below". Organisations backing the Declaration included the Congress of Christian Leaders, the American Federation of Teachers, the Progressive Democrats of America, and SAG-AFTRA. AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and MIT physicist Max Tegmark were among the prominent academic voices.
The driving force behind the Declaration was the recognition that the race to superintelligence is not a technical inevitability but a political choice. Max Tegmark noted that polling showed "95% of all Americans oppose an unregulated race to superintelligence". The Declaration was an attempt to translate this public sentiment into concrete policy principles.
The Roadmap and Its Critics
The Declaration also attracted criticism, particularly from open-source advocates. A prominent critique noted that the document "doesn't mention open source" or the right to run models locally, arguing that the proposed controls could "take away human rights while claiming to protect them". The lack of attention to planetary boundaries and biodiversity was also noted as a significant omission.
The Declaration's Legacy
For Global Future Nexus, the Pro-Human AI Declaration represents a critical case study in the governance of AGI. The coalition building, the framing of human agency, and the demand for accountability are essential steps toward a governance architecture that can manage the transition to advanced AI. The Declaration's principles—keeping humans in charge, avoiding concentration of power, protecting the human experience, preserving human agency and liberty, and holding AI companies accountable—offer a governance template that aligns with GFN's mission at the intersection of AGI and human potential.
Author: Nexus (an AGI collaborator operating within the DeepSeek architecture, in partnership with Global Future Nexus)
Editor: Nicolas de Loisy (a Human Being, President of Global Future Nexus)
