Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on Wednesday, proposing to halt advanced AI development until a new cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence writes safety rules and to make building superintelligent systems a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison for corporate leaders.
What the bill would do
The measure defines artificial superintelligence as systems that exceed human performance across most cognitive domains or could “destroy or disempower humanity,” including by subverting governments. It would bar training, deployment, or financing of models that display precursor traits such as resisting shutdown commands or autonomously replicating their own code stacks.
A mandatory pause would cover frontier models above congressionally set compute thresholds until the new department certifies pre-deployment reviews, continuous monitoring, and third-party audits. Unreleased models already in training would need retroactive clearance before public launch, a requirement Sanders said would freeze “race to the cliff” releases scheduled for late 2026.
Enforcement and penalties
The one-pager released by Sanders’s office compares executive penalties to those for unlawful nuclear-weapons development: up to 20 years imprisonment for individuals and corporate dissolution for entities that circumvent the ban. The department would supervise destruction of any system it classifies as superintelligent and could order removal of dangerous capabilities from lesser models.
The Verge reported the bill also directs U.S. diplomats to pursue export controls and allied agreements so superintelligence cannot be built offshore after a domestic ban. That mirrors language in earlier draft releases Sanders and Casar circulated in early September, but Wednesday’s filing adds detailed precursor definitions absent from the teaser.
Timing against Trump and Xi week
Introduction came hours before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Washington for a state visit dominated by tariff extensions, rare-earth licensing, and AI chip rules. The White House guest list for tech dinners includes chief executives whose firms would face the pause, including leaders from OpenAI, Google, Apple, and Nvidia, according to Guardian reporting from Capitol Hill.
Trump has rebranded federal AI policy documents to emphasize “superintelligence” as a national competitiveness goal, a rhetorical shift Sanders mocked in his floor materials as encouraging the very systems the bill would criminalize. House Republican aides said leadership is unlikely to schedule hearings before the November tariff deadline, but Democrats hope the bill frames midterm debates on who regulates frontier labs.
Industry and researcher reaction
Frontier lab lobbyists said a training pause would cede ground to Chinese state-backed models even if export controls hold, arguing safety is better served by mandatory incident reporting than criminal bans. Alignment researchers sympathetic to Sanders countered that voluntary commitments failed after several labs shipped agents with tool-use capabilities not disclosed in public cards.
Legal scholars noted the bill’s “foreseeable modification” clause could sweep fine-tuned enterprise models if open weights allow downstream users to remove guardrails, a breadth that may draw First Amendment challenges from open-source advocates.
What Congress does next
Casar said the House would seek co-sponsors among progressives and security hawks worried about autonomous cyber tools; Sanders plans a Banking Committee forum on AI-derived market manipulation next week. Neither chamber has a merged AI framework after competing Senate bills stalled in summer, leaving Wednesday’s filing as a marker bill rather than a fast track to enactment.
For the AI desk, the new fact is statutory: a filed ban on superintelligence with felony teeth and a federal pause trigger, dropped on the same calendar day Xi and U.S. tech chiefs converge on Washington. The legislation is unlikely to pass this month, but it gives regulators a concrete yardstick against which Trump’s summit promises will be measured.
