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September 23, 2026
Sanders Wants to Ban Superintelligence Before It Outruns Washington
Sanders and Casar are framing advanced AI as a public-risk problem that demands intervention now, not after the technology has become too powerful to govern. Their proposal puts a hard brake on superintelligence while assigning Washington a more active role in overseeing what comes next.
The push began Wednesday, when Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar unveiled legislation aimed at the far edge of the AI race: artificial superintelligence. The progressive lawmakers’ proposal would ban the development of such systems and establish a federal body to oversee advanced AI.1
Their argument is not that every use of AI should be stopped. It is that a technology designed to surpass human intelligence presents a different order of risk — one Congress should not leave to companies racing for commercial advantage. The bill pairs a prohibition on superintelligence with a proposed Department of AI, seeking to give the federal government a standing role in monitoring and regulating increasingly capable systems.1
Sanders’s political message is deliberately blunt: caution need not require technical wizardry. “It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘slow it down,’” reads the framing of his announcement.2
The proposal arrives as parts of the AI industry itself have pressed Congress for guardrails, creating a limited point of overlap between progressive lawmakers and some technology leaders. But the Sanders-Casar approach goes further than a call for voluntary safeguards or general regulation. Its central demand is a line that developers cannot cross: no artificial superintelligence.
That is the core tension now facing Washington. Supporters of the bill are betting that preventing a feared capability is wiser than attempting to contain it after it arrives. The measure turns the AI debate from one about managing innovation into one about whether some forms of innovation should be barred altogether.