Sanders Unveils Bill to Permanently Ban Superintelligent AI

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Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar are introducing legislation that would permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, escalating the fight in Washington over how far AI companies should be allowed to push the technology.

The “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act” defines its target as “a system that exceeds human cognitive ability or has sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the destruction or disempowerment of humanity.” Short of that outright ban, the bill would also impose an immediate pause on advanced AI development until federal safety rules are in place, create a new Department of Artificial Intelligence to oversee the industry, and require federal approval before any advanced AI system can be deployed. Violations would carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

“It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘slow it down,'” Sanders said in laying out the case for the bill. He framed the core concern in blunt terms: “Do we really want to develop a super intelligence that when it becomes smarter than human beings could act independently of human control? I don’t think we do.”

Sanders, 85, has pushed AI regulation before, having introduced related proposals back in June. This time he took a direct shot at President Trump’s approach to the technology, which has favored minimal oversight: “I think Trump has very little understanding of what this issue is about.”

The bill has drawn support from inside the AI industry itself. Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, a safety systems researcher at OpenAI, and Swante Scholz, a software engineer at Google DeepMind, have both publicly backed the legislation, a notable break from the industry’s typical resistance to hard regulatory limits.

Even so, the bill faces long odds in a Republican-controlled Congress that has generally favored a lighter regulatory touch on AI development. Whether or not it advances, the proposal marks one of the most aggressive legislative attempts yet to draw a hard legal line around what AI systems should be permitted to become.