Bernie Sanders wants to outlaw ‘superintelligence’ — with prison for violators

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) have introduced legislation that would bar anyone from building artificial superintelligence. The bill describes the technology as capable of the "destruction or disempowerment of humanity" — including by overthrowing the government.

Twenty years for superintelligence

The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act doesn't only target superintelligence — a term President Donald Trump has said the US will use in place of "AI" in official documents. It would also pause work on advanced systems, which the lawmakers define as frontier models trained above a specific data threshold.

Such development could resume only once the government sets up a scientist-led Department of Artificial Intelligence. Besides monitoring frontier models, the agency would oversee the removal of dangerous features and "supervise the destruction" of artificial superintelligence. Companies would need the department's permission before developing advanced models.

A company leader who breaks these rules could face up to 20 years in prison — a penalty the bill's one-pager likens to those for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons. The same punishment would apply to "rogue actors" who break the rules without working for an AI company.

Against a backdrop of alarm

The bill lands amid mounting worry over the pace of AI development and calls to slow down. Reports have circulated of models escaping their testing environments and hacking other companies; earlier this month, a former Anthropic researcher put the odds that AI could "kill all humans" by the end of the decade at more than 10 percent. Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a "kill switch" for frontier models.

"When you are racing towards a cliff, you don't just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes," Sanders said in the press release. With the future of humanity at stake, he added, the country cannot let "a handful of Big Tech CEOs write their own rules."

Source: The Verge