Sanders, Casar bill would ban artificial superintelligence

The bill arrives as Congress has done little to rein in the AI industry, even as some of its most prominent leaders warn about potentially catastrophic risks. It was provided first to The Associated Press, and the support it drew from current employees at AI companies and experts suggests the safety debate is no longer only an outside critique.

The political backdrop is scrambled. President Donald Trump has resisted recent calls for greater government oversight, putting him at odds with tech leaders including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk. Sanders, a two-time presidential candidate who is now 85, has focused on the issue in recent months, introducing legislation in June to create a sovereign wealth fund financed through a one-time tax on the stock of the largest AI companies and hosting colleagues for a briefing with experts last week.

The bill's path runs through a Republican-controlled Congress where lawmakers have struggled to coalesce around even less sweeping AI regulations, and the prospect of slowing US development while China continues has been a central argument against restrictions. Sanders has 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. Whether that framing can win over opponents is likely to determine how far the proposal travels, and AI safety is expected to be a central part of talks between Trump and China's Xi Jinping at the White House this week.