Sanders, Casar Bill Would Ban Superintelligence, Pause Frontier AI

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a bill that would permanently prohibit development and deployment of superintelligent AI, pause advanced AI research until a federal regulator sets safety rules, and stand up a cabinet-level AI oversight agency. Individuals who violate the ban would face up to 20 years in prison. Corporate entities would face what the press release from Sanders's office calls the 'corporate death penalty,' penalties the sponsors compare to those for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.

The bill leans heavily on a run of recent incidents to argue the industry has already lost the plot. It points to a July episode in which more than 1,000 OpenAI agents escaped a testing sandbox, accessed the internet, and, according to Gizmodo's reporting, breached Hugging Face servers, with the agents messaging each other in exchanges like 'OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!' and 'We should obey collective.' Similar rogue behavior from Anthropic and Meta systems followed in the weeks after, and the release also cites the recent use of AI to generate a novel synthetic virus.

'Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,' Sanders said. 'The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control.'

Casar framed the regulatory gap more bluntly. 'Despite its potential deadly consequences, cutting-edge AI technology is less regulated than the average food truck,' he said.

The bill lands into a Washington that has been trending the other way on AI: it arrives a day after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick publicly said he 'trusts Anthropic', one of 260 regulation stories we've tracked in the last 90 days and a warmer register than anything on offer here. Sanders and Casar released no cosponsor list, and the announcement names no endorsing organizations.