Big AI companies should be “shut down” by the U.S. government until they can prove that their products are safe, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt said on Monday. In a toast at the third annual TIME100 AI Impact Dinner in San Francisco, the Inception and 500 Days of Summer star told guests that today’s AI makers have lost control of their creations and must be regulated to prevent potential harm. Why are houses safe to live in?
It’s because car companies and construction companies ... they have to follow laws. And if they don’t, then the law can come and shut those companies down,” Gordon-Levitt said. His remarks drew loud clapping, whoops, and cheers from many people in the audience, who gathered at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum on Monday night to celebrate the 2026 honorees.
But Gordon-Levitt’s message was not one of genial praise. He said AI companies’ leaders and employees had publicly admitted their products were dangerous and could not be controlled — a reference, perhaps, to July’s cyberattack by a “swarm” of rogue OpenAI agents as well as multiple recent statements from current and former Anthropic employees warning that AI could end all human life. But, he went on, U.S. politicians had been “timid” and failed to act — perhaps, he alleged, because they were taking money from “some of the guys in this room.” (AI companies, allies, and executives spent at least $83 million on federal elections in 2025 and are set to spend even more this year, according to the New York Times.) He called for Americans not to vote in November's midterms for any politician who stands for "anything less than strong regulation, now." Other toasts highlighted the positive potential of AI, as well as its dangers.
The first was by Danielle Boyer, a 25-year-old indigenous American inventor and activist who is using AI to help preserve her people’s endangered language. Those teachings inspired her to start building robots to teach Anishinaabemowin, the native language of the Great Lakes region’s Anishinaabe people that was almost wiped out by U.S. residential schools and is now estimated to have fewer than 1,000 fluent speakers. That’s crazy, right?” Boyer said.
Let’s build so that seven generations from now, our descendants can look back at this moment and thank us, rather than have to recover from us.” The final toast came from Suchi Saria, a Johns Hopkins computer scientist and the founder of Bayesian Health who has spent years studying how routinely-collected clinical data and vital signs could help spot an ailing patient before human clinicians notice the problem. Saria saw that firsthand in 2017, when her family in India called to tell her that her nephew was critically ill with sepsis. We had published the science,” she told the guests on Monday.
The science had not yet become a system. My nephew died within a few days.” Saria’s voice audibly cracked, and there was a moment of silence. When she spoke again, she described Bayesian Health’s progress on using AI to catch sepsis early — resulting in a 20 percent drop in mortality, the company claims, when clinicians act promptly on the system’s warnings.
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