A US bill would ban ‘superintelligent’ AI outright, with 20 years in prison for building it

Most AI legislation tries to manage the technology. A new bill in the US Congress proposes to forbid one version of it entirely, and to punish building it like a serious crime.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would outlaw the development of what it calls artificial superintelligence and back the ban with penalties usually reserved for weapons of mass destruction.

The definition is deliberately sweeping. The bill describes artificial superintelligence as AI that exceeds human cognitive performance across most domains, or that has enough capability to destroy or disempower humanity, including by overthrowing the federal government.

The penalties match the framing. Companies that violate the ban would face what the bill calls a ‘corporate death penalty’ — effectively being shut down — and individuals could face up to 20 years in prison. Sanders’ office explicitly compares this to the penalties for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.

It would also create a cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence and pause work on the most advanced systems until that department writes safety rules.

Why This Is Notable Even If It Fails

The realistic first thing to say is that this bill is very unlikely to become law as written. It faces a Republican-controlled environment, a president who has called AI-risk concerns a hoax, and an industry that would fight it with everything it has.

But its significance is not its odds of passing. It is that a sitting senator and congressman are willing to propose banning a category of technology outright, with prison terms, and to frame frontier AI as comparable to nuclear weapons. That moves the boundary of what is sayable in mainstream politics, and it gives a marker that future, narrower bills can be measured against.

The argument behind the bill is not fringe, and it deserves stating at its strongest.

Some of the most senior figures inside the AI labs themselves have warned publicly that systems beyond human control could pose catastrophic risk. If one takes those warnings seriously, then treating the deliberate creation of such a system as something like weapons proliferation is a coherent response, not an overreaction. The bill essentially asks: if the people building it say it could be that dangerous, why is building it legal?

The objections are equally real, and fairness requires them.

The definition is the weak point. ‘Exceeds human cognitive performance across most domains’ has no agreed technical test, and a law that bans something no one can precisely define invites arbitrary enforcement or simply fails in court. A ban also does nothing about development elsewhere in the world; superintelligence prohibited in the US but pursued in China or beyond is not prevented, only relocated, unless the international agreements the bill gestures at actually materialise.

And there is the innovation cost. A pause enforced by prison terms is a heavy instrument to point at a fast-moving field, and it risks freezing beneficial work alongside the dangerous kind, because the definition does not cleanly separate them.

The bill also has to be read as a political signal, not only a legal proposal. It stakes out a position — that AI risk is grave enough to warrant criminal prohibition — at the opposite pole from an administration rejecting even voluntary international oversight.

That polarisation is itself the story. AI policy in the US now runs from ‘no oversight is legitimate’ to ‘building the frontier should be a felony’, with little settled ground between. A technology advancing this fast is being legislated by a politics this far apart.

Whether the bill attracts co-sponsors or remains a two-member statement. Whether its ‘superintelligence’ definition is refined into something a court could apply. And whether any of its ideas — a dedicated AI department, mandatory safety rules before deployment — survive into more modest legislation that could actually pass.