Sanders, Casar Introduce Bill to Ban Superintelligence, Create AI Department

Two leading progressive lawmakers, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar, are unveiling legislation that would permanently prohibit artificial superintelligence and establish a federal Department of Artificial Intelligence to oversee advanced AI systems.

The bill would also pause development of the most advanced AI systems until new federal safety rules are written by the proposed department. Once those guidelines exist, advanced systems would need federal approval before deployment. Violations could carry significant penalties, including prison terms of up to 20 years in some cases.

The measure defines artificial superintelligence as a system that exceeds human cognitive ability, or that has sufficient capabilities to plan and carry out the destruction or disempowerment of humanity.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont, framed the proposal as a matter of caution. "It doesn't take a genius to say, 'slow it down,'" he said. "Do we really want to develop a super intelligence that when it becomes smarter than human beings could act independently of human control? I don't think we do."

Several current employees at AI companies and outside experts have endorsed the bill. Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, a researcher in OpenAI's Safety Systems, said superintelligence "could either go extremely right or extremely wrong" and that "we shouldn't be playing such games." Swante Scholz, a software engineer at Google DeepMind who said he was not speaking for his employer, said the current path of development makes "an existential catastrophe for humanity" the most likely outcome, adding that a ban on superintelligence development "would be a positive change for the foreseeable future."

The proposal arrives as some of the industry's own leaders have urged Congress to impose guardrails on advancing technology, even as President Donald Trump has resisted calls for greater government oversight. That stance has put him at odds with tech figures including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk.

The bill faces long odds in the Republican-controlled Congress, where lawmakers have struggled to coalesce around even less sweeping AI regulations. Still, it offers a window into how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is approaching the issue ahead of November's midterms and a 2028 presidential campaign in which the technology is expected to feature prominently. Casar, a Democrat from Texas, chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Potential 2028 candidates have moved quickly in recent weeks to show they are taking the issue seriously. Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore announced an AI regulation plan on Tuesday, and California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom last week signed an executive order to speed implementation of a state law calling for independent oversight of AI companies.

Sanders, a two-time presidential candidate who is now 85, has focused on the issue in recent months. In June he introduced legislation to create a sovereign wealth fund financed through a one-time tax on the stock of the largest AI companies. Last week he hosted colleagues for a briefing with experts and attended a conference on the issue alongside Republicans, including former White House adviser Steve Bannon.

The debate has scrambled political alliances in Washington and among voters. Americans have grown more concerned about AI's environmental impacts over the past year, according to a recent poll, with about 53% saying they are "extremely" or "very" concerned, up from 41% a year earlier. Democrats account for much of the increase, but the survey also points to broader worries about the local impact of data centers that power AI and cloud computing.

Trump, meanwhile, has pushed in the opposite direction. On Tuesday he told the United Nations General Assembly that artificial intelligence will be renamed "super intelligence." Sanders said Trump has "very little understanding of what this issue is about" and is "mainly concerned about the economic implications of a slowdown."

AI safety is expected to be a central part of talks between Trump and China's Xi Jinping at the White House this week as the countries compete for dominance in the sector. The prospect of slowing development in the United States while China continues has been a central argument against sweeping restrictions. Sanders argued that avoiding the most dangerous forms of AI would ultimately require cooperation between the two countries, comparing the challenge to nuclear arms control during the Cold War.

"Ronald Reagan, arch-conservative, was smart enough to understand that he had to sit down with Gorbachev, a communist, and work out a nuclear treaty that protected humanity," he said. "I think we can do that again now."