Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act announced in US Congress
On 3 September 2026 Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, legislation that would permanently prohibit the development and deployment of superintelligent AI in the United States, temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules, and make it US policy to pursue international agreements preventing superintelligence from being developed anywhere. Sanders said the leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology they are building. The announcement fell on the same day OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra. The measure was announced as forthcoming legislation, not enacted law.
Why It Mattered
Bills that do not pass rarely belong in a reference history. This one is recorded because it is the first attempt by sitting members of Congress to prohibit a class of AI capability outright rather than to regulate its use — a move from risk management to prohibition, with liability attached rather than compliance obligations. Sanders is the most prominent American politician to call for an outright ban on superintelligence, and the sponsors' argument is built from the developers' own words: the case for prohibition rests on public statements by frontier labs that they cannot fully explain or control their systems. The coalition is the second reason to note the date. Support spans AI safety researchers including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio alongside figures of the populist right, an alignment absent from earlier US AI legislative fights, and it exposes the large developers on two political flanks at once instead of the familiar single axis of consumer protection against innovation. The definitional problem is severe and was attacked immediately: "superintelligent" and "capabilities matching or exceeding human cognitive performance" are not legally settled terms, and critics including Gary Marcus objected that a blanket pause and a capability ban are unworkable as drafted. Whatever becomes of the text, it establishes prohibition as a live mainstream position in American politics rather than a fringe one, and gives subsequent legislation a template to borrow from or to argue against. Historians of AI regulation will date the prohibition argument's arrival in Congress to this week.
Who Built It
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar
Applications
- AI Legislation
- Frontier Model Governance