By Stephen Council,Tech Reporter Oct 28, 2025 (SFGate.com)
Two San Francisco startups focused on very different aspects of artificial intelligence have caught Bernie Sanders’ eye — and he made his worries known this week.
The Vermont senator, who’s drawn large crowds this year on his nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has in recent weeks ramped up his focus on the impacts of AI. First came a report, in early October, with Sanders’ policy suggestions for helping workers. This week, he brought his concerns more directly to the public.
In an interview with Axios that published on Friday, Sanders talked through his concerns that AI’s leaders don’t care about working-class people and that AI could cause “massive job dislocation.” Asked whether he thinks OpenAI should be broken up, he said, “I do,” and added that AI’s advent is like “a meteor coming to this planet.”
Then, he pivoted to the social side. He didn’t name the San Francisco startup Friend but pointed to it directly — the AI pendant-maker has grown notorious this year for vast numbers of billboards in Los Angeles and New York that imply its device can become a friend.
“There are products now being sold as, ‘You don’t need to relate to a human being anymore! You’ll have somebody hanging around your neck as your AI buddy,’” Sanders said. “And in a country where there’s a lot of emotional distress, I really worry about that.”
Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann shared the interview clip on X. He told SFGATE in a text on Tuesday that he’s glad to be working on something politicians “realize they need have an opinion on” and thinks his campaign has helped solidify the pendant as “the ai companion device form factor.”
“I don’t view the concept as dystopian nor replacing human connection, it is simply a new kind of relationship that I believe will only deepen our understanding of ourselves and everyone else,” Schiffmann wrote. “I guess we’ll see what happens.”
Friend is far from the only company working on AI companions, and it’s unclear whether Meta’s AI glasses, OpenAI and Jony Ive’s secrecy-shrouded collaboration, or some other startup will push the new technology further into our everyday lives. Sanders isn’t the only politician concerned about the safety and implications of AI; on Tuesday, Sanders’ Senate colleagues Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal announced a bipartisan bill that would ban chatbot companions for minors.
Sanders threw another salvo at San Francisco’s tech scene on Monday, posting a fuzzy image to Instagram of a billboard for Artisan that blared: “Stop Hiring Humans” and “The Era of AI Employees Is Here.” Artisan sells tools that automate various sales tasks.
The senator wrote: “Billboards across the country are promoting the replacement of millions of jobs with AI and robotics. Great idea. One simple question: How will those displaced workers survive when there are no jobs or income for them?”
Artisan’s inflammatory billboard campaign — the startup has the same message on a wall at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Moscone West this week — has, like Friend’s, succeeded in spreading name recognition. “Luckily, the people who were mad aren’t our target audience,” CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack wrote in a June blog post praising the campaign’s results. “We target tech companies, and the vast majority of people who work at and run tech companies loved the campaign.”
When SFGATE wrote about the company’s billboards in December, the CEO said in a text: “They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI. The way the world works is changing.” He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
Sanders’ post about Artisan, as of Tuesday afternoon, had amassed almost 188,000 likes. His office did not respond to SFGATE’s requests for comment.
Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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Oct 28, 2025
Tech Reporter
Stephen Council is the tech reporter at SFGATE. He has covered technology and business for The Information, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and CalMatters, where his reporting won a San Francisco Press Club award.
Signal: 628-204-5452
Email: stephen.council@sfgate.com
