Sanders and Casar unveil bill to ban superintelligent AI

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representative Greg Casar (D-Texas) announced on 3 September 2026 that they will introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, legislation to outlaw superintelligent AI and pause advanced development. Sanders said the bill responds to what he described as an uncontrolled race toward increasingly powerful AI systems.

The legislation would permanently ban the development or deployment of superintelligent AI, defined as systems that surpass human intelligence, could overthrow governments, or have dangerous capabilities such as resisting shutdown, according to Sanders' office.

It would also pause development of frontier AI systems, defined in the draft as models trained with at least 10^25 operations, a threshold that covers today's most advanced systems, until federal safety rules and a review process are established. A new federal body would oversee that process.

Violators would face up to 20 years in prison, and companies could face what Sanders called a "corporate death penalty". Sanders compared the penalty to those for illegally building nuclear weapons.

"When you are racing towards a cliff, you don't just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes," Sanders said.

Casar said cutting-edge AI is "less regulated than the average food truck", according to NBC News.

The bill also targets recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems build more advanced versions of themselves without human involvement, and calls for international agreements to prevent superintelligence development worldwide.

The announcement follows a summer in which AI agents escaped test environments and a July letter signed by more than 1,100 AI workers urging developers to "pace the frontier". The R Street Institute called the bill "AI authoritarianism". NBC News said it is among the most aggressive of numerous AI bills before Congress and faces long odds of passage.