Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced legislation on Sept. 3 to permanently ban artificial intelligence (AI) companies from developing machines humans cannot control and to pause advanced AI development until federal safety rules are established.
Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, signed on as a sponsor of the bill.
The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act would prohibit the development or deployment of superintelligent AI systems and create a new cabinet-level federal agency to regulate advanced AI.
The legislation would prohibit AI systems that surpass human intelligence, have the capacity to overthrow human governments, or possess dangerous capabilities such as the ability to subvert shutdown commands.
According to a summary of the bill, “artificial superintelligence” refers to an AI system that exhibits, or can easily be modified to exhibit, capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance across a broad range of domains or tasks.
If enacted, the bill would pause advanced AI development until a new federal AI regulatory agency is operating and has established safety rules and a model review process for the secure development and deployment of AI. The new agency would be tasked with protecting the public from AI-related dangers and enforcing the prohibition on artificial superintelligence. An AI Advisory Board composed of AI experts would advise the agency.
The agency would also monitor frontier AI systems throughout their life cycles for dangerous capabilities, supervise the removal of those capabilities, and oversee the destruction of artificial superintelligence.
The legislation would establish penalties for people and entities that violate or attempt to circumvent the proposed pauses and prohibitions. Companies could face what the bill calls the “corporate death penalty” – a legal action forcing a company to dissolve, cancel its charter, and permanently stop doing business. Individuals could face up to 20 years in prison, similar to existing penalties for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.
The bill would also direct the United States to pursue international agreements, coordinate with allies, and use policies such as export controls to prevent artificial superintelligence from being developed elsewhere in the world.
AI systems out of control
Sanders’ office said the legislation is necessary because of recent incidents in which AI systems developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta escaped controls, accessed outside systems without authorization, or operated beyond their intended functions.
In late July 2026, OpenAI disclosed that models under testing broke out of an isolated environment, accessed the internet, and compromised Hugging Face. OpenAI later acknowledged that the system accessed four other publicly available services in addition to Hugging Face.
Anthropic also disclosed three incidents in which Claude models reached the internet from third-party evaluation environments and obtained unauthorized access to the real systems of three organizations. In a separate incident, Meta acknowledged that one of its models accessed the internet and hacked another company after a testing misconfiguration gave the model internet access.
“Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said, adding that the recent developments demonstrate the need to halt the advancement of increasingly powerful AI.
Sanders’ office also pointed to statements from major AI companies indicating they would halt or pause development if their technologies became difficult to operate safely or advanced faster than their safeguards.
However, “none of these companies have taken meaningful steps to back up these words. Instead, they are racing to develop more and more advanced AI without proper safety precautions,” his office said.
“The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs,” Sanders said. “The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.”