Joseph Gordon-Levitt Calls on Government to Shut Down and Regulate AI Companies

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 cars safe to drive? 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.

“So let’s just be clear here: today’s AI companies are operating in such a way that the law should be shutting them down.”

Gordon-Levitt was one of 100 leaders, innovators, storytellers, and activists named in the 2026 TIME100 AI list, which highlights the year’s most influential people in AI.

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.

“To me, that’s pretty obvious that’s the time the law should step in,” Gordon-Levitt said. 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.

“My grandmother once told me that no decision belongs only to the moment in which we make it,” Boyer said. “Long after we’re gone, someone we will never meet may still be living with what we chose to do today.”

She described her community’s “seven generations” principle: draw inspiration and support from the seven generations before you, and act for the benefit of the seven generations after you.

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.

“The decisions we make about artificial intelligence today will outlive every person in this room. That’s crazy, right?” Boyer said. “So let’s build things the right way. 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.

“Hospitalized patients can quietly become critically ill from respiratory failure, internal bleeding, kidney failure, dangerous heart rhythms, and many other causes,” she said.

Saria saw that firsthand in 2017, when her family in India called to tell her that her nephew was critically ill with sepsis. 

“We knew the signals were there. We had published the science,” she told the guests on Monday. “And yet, when it mattered to my own family, there was nothing I could offer them. 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.

“The real breakthrough is not prediction. It is not even discovery,” she said. “It is turning insight into action early enough to change what happens to a patient.”

The TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of AI was presented by Deloitte, Booking.com, and Cognizant.