WASHINGTON, September 13 — Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation that would send developers to prison for up to 20 years if they push ahead with building artificial superintelligence without authorization. The Vermont independent, who has publicly discussed the proposal, frames the development of ASI as a threat on the order of illegally building a rogue nuclear weapon. His bill would attach criminal penalties to that work, with a maximum punishment matching federal law for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.
That comparison is the heart of the idea. ASI describes a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that would surpass human cognitive abilities across virtually all domains.
It is not the same thing as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which describes AI that can perform any intellectual task a human can. AGI remains theoretical. What has changed is the pace.
Rapid advances in large language models and other AI systems have intensified public debate about the risks and governance of increasingly powerful machines, and Sanders is now adding a criminal-enforcement dimension to that conversation.
Few lawmakers have gone this far
Lawmakers in the United States and abroad have proposed various regulatory frameworks for AI. Few have suggested criminal penalties for developers. Treating ASI development as a crime akin to nuclear proliferation is likely to provoke debate among technologists, legal scholars and policymakers.
Sanders was first elected to the US Senate in 2006 and ran twice for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 2016 and 2020. His long record in Congress centers on economic inequality and corporate power, and this proposal marks a turn toward the safety questions surrounding advanced computing.
No vote on the proposal has been announced, and it remains unclear whether it will advance in Congress. The exact text of the legislation, its scope and any exemptions have not been detailed in public reports. The proposal lands amid heightened attention to AI governance, including international summits and calls for moratoriums on certain AI research.
Watch for whether Sanders releases the bill’s text, and whether any committee takes it up.
