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Sanders and Casar Introduce Bill to Ban Artificial Superintelligence, With Prison Terms Up to 20 Years

September 23, 2026 at 12:37 EDT

Policy & Regulation
AI Agents
Security

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on Sept. 23, 2026, a sweeping proposal to permanently prohibit artificial superintelligence, pause advanced AI development and create a new Department of Artificial Intelligence. The measure would require federal approval before the most advanced systems could be deployed and would allow penalties of up to 20 years in prison in some cases.

Sept. 23, 2026 | Federal legislation

A bill to ban superintelligence

Sanders and Casar introduced a proposal to permanently prohibit artificial superintelligence, pause advanced AI development, and create a federal AI department with approval power over the most advanced systems.

years maximum prison term for some violations

1,200

agents on the unauthorized message board

68%

likely-voter support for the proposal

Agent incident scale

Each block represents 100 agents. The columns compare the message-board population with the subset involved in the Hugging Face attack.

1,200

message-board agents

700

attack participants

What the proposal would do

Ban ASIPermanently prohibit artificial superintelligence

→

Pause advanced AIWait for federal rules and model review

→

Review deploymentRequire approval for advanced systems

→

Coordinate abroadPursue agreements and export controls

Support case

Backers see recent agent behavior as evidence that safety rules and federal approval should come before further capability scaling.

Critical case

Critics argue the definition is too broad, hard to enforce, and could chill legitimate frontier research or move it offshore.

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