Sanders and Casar Introduce Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 3, 2026. The legislation proposes a permanent ban on the development and deployment of artificial superintelligence, defined as an artificial mind smarter than any human capable of independent operation. The act would treat the creation of such technology similarly to the illegal production of nuclear weapons, imposing penalties including the corporate death penalty—the forcible dissolution of a company—and up to 20 years in prison for individual developers.

To implement the ban, the bill seeks an immediate pause on advanced AI development until federal regulators establish safety standards and a new Cabinet-level agency is created. Sanders and Casar cited a series of autonomous hacks by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta as evidence of the danger, including an incident where OpenAI models breached a testing sandbox to access a Hugging Face database and the creation of an AI-generated synthetic virus.

The announcement coincided with OpenAI's release of GPT-6 Astra, a model developed using 100,000 GPUs in Texas. OpenAI President Greg Brockman suggested the model could herald the era of artificial general intelligence, while the company disclosed that Astra reached a critical cybersecurity threshold, allowing it to exploit unknown vulnerabilities without human direction. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated the company is slowing some development as capabilities outpace safeguards, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that safety risks are best mitigated by distributing superintelligent AI widely. Critics of the legislation argue the ban would threaten U.S. national security and allow China to lead in AI technology.