Bernie Sanders proposes banning ‘superintelligence’ and putting violators in prison

Bernie Sanders proposes banning ‘superintelligence’ and putting violators in prison

Under the bill, AI leaders who continue developing artificial superintelligence would face up to 20 years in prison.

Under the bill, AI leaders who continue developing artificial superintelligence would face up to 20 years in prison.

by

Emma Roth

Sep 23, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images

Emma Roth

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX)have introduced new legislationthat would ban anyone from developing artificial superintelligence — a technology the bill describes as capable of the “destruction or disempowerment of humanity,” including by overthrowing the government. Under theBan Artificial Superintelligence Act, AI leaders would face up to 20 years in prison for violating the law.

The bill doesn’t just take aim at the more powerful superintelligence,a term President Donald Trump said the US will use in place of “AI”in official documents. It would also pause the development of advanced AI systems, which lawmakers classify as frontier models trained on a specific threshold of data. The law would only allow advanced AI development to continue once the government creates a scientist-led Department of Artificial Intelligence to oversee the technology. Along with monitoring frontier AI models, this agency would oversee the removal of dangerous features and “supervise the destruction” of artificial superintelligence.

Sanders and Casar’s legislation would also require AI companies to get permission from the Department of AI to develop advanced AI models. If a leader at an AI company violates any of these laws, they could face up to 20 years in prison, “which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons,” accordingto the bill’s one-pager. This penalty would also apply to “rogue actors” who break these rules but aren’t employed by an AI company.

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This new bill comesas concerns growabout the rapid development of AIand calls to slow things down. Amidreportsof AI modelsescapingtheir testing environments and hacking other companies, a former Anthropic researchersaid earlier this monththat there’s a more than 10 percent chance AI could “kill all humans” by the end of the decade. Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsomproposed a “kill switch”for frontier models. Potential regulationstill seems shaky overall.

“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes,” Sen. Sanders says in the press release. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we cannot let a handful of Big Tech CEOs write their own rules.”

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