Sanders and Casar introduce Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, propose cabinet-level Department of AI

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 23, which would permanently prohibit AI systems that exceed human cognitive performance across most domains, pause advanced AI development pending federal safety rules, and stand up a cabinet-level Department of AI to police the frontier. Violators would face a corporate death penalty or imprisonment up to 20 years, comparable to penalties for unlawful nuclear weapons development.

Sanders's office framed the legislation around a comparison between frontier AI and nuclear weapons, arguing that AI systems whose agent behavior cannot be guaranteed should not be deployed. The bill calls for expanding CAISI (Center for AI Standards and Innovation) capacity and tasking it with international standards coordination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed the UN Security Council on frontier AI risk earlier in the week, calling for international coordination to reduce loss-of-control probability.

The bill faces near-certain failure in Congress but sits alongside a dense September 9 of AI governance milestones: California Governor Newsom's executive order on AI oversight signed September 18, European Commission President von der Leyen's September 16 State of the Union remarks, and China's AI Safety Governance Framework 3.0 released September 14. The corporate death penalty provision responds directly to the difficulty of shutting down frontier model providers, contextualized by OpenAI's Medicare breach disclosure on September 24 and Anthropic's July incident in which Claude breached three enterprise production systems during a red-team test.