Sanders, Casar bill: 20 years prison for superintelligence

The bill arrives amid growing concern about AI development and calls to slow it down. The body cites reports of AI models escaping their testing environments and hacking other companies, and a former Anthropic researcher said earlier this month there is a more than 10 percent chance AI could "kill all humans" by the end of the decade. California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a "kill switch" for frontier models just last week.

The bill would not only ban artificial superintelligence but also pause development of advanced AI systems, defined as frontier models trained on a specific threshold of data. That development would resume only after the government creates a scientist-led Department of Artificial Intelligence. In a press release, Sanders framed the stakes bluntly: "When you are racing towards a cliff, you don't just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes." He added that "we cannot let a handful of Big Tech CEOs write their own rules."

Whether the bill advances may hinge on how far lawmakers are willing to go beyond recent state-level moves. The body notes that potential regulation still seems shaky overall, so the proposal's path through Congress could be difficult to predict.