Khanna to Introduce Bill Banning Recursive Self-Improving AI

Rep. Ro Khanna will introduce the Human Control Over AI Act, a bill that would ban AI models that recursively self-improve or autonomously modify their own core objectives, containment or shutdown controls until a new federal agency approves them, CNBC reported.

Khanna, ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, is blunt about why. 'There's actually a civilizational extinction risk,' he told CNBC. 'There's a safety risk of loss of control, and then there's a misuse risk, and we need to take both seriously.'

The bill would create a new federal AI safety agency, modeled after the FDA, to oversee frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and xAI. That agency would set standards for sandbox testing environments; air gaps, or isolating testing environments from the internet; kill switches; and controls that prevent models from escaping lab settings and roaming on the Internet. Companies would be required to hold extensive liability insurance to release their models. Employees who disable safeguards, kill switches, logging or containment systems, or who knowingly deploy an unauthorized system, would face criminal penalties. The bill would also criminalize 'crimes against humanity' for the deployment of AI models that result in the destruction of civilian populations.

Khanna acknowledged that the recursive self-improvement capability the ban targets does not currently exist at the level he wants prohibited, and argued that governments should act before companies develop it. Alongside the domestic bill, he is calling for the administration to pursue enforceable agreements and targeted export controls to deter China and other adversaries from building the same systems.

It lands in a week already crowded with AI-policy motion, from Pope Leo warning of a 'paradise of machines' in Paris to the NYT arguing AI's acceleration has opened a global policy vacuum as EU enforcement slips behind.