Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 4, which would permanently prohibit developing or deploying AI systems that match or exceed human cognitive performance across a broad range of domains, or that can easily be modified to do so.
Violating entities would face a corporate death penalty, individuals up to 20 years in prison, a penalty the bill compares to those for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons, and any existing superintelligent systems would be subject to supervised destruction. The bill also imposes a temporary pause on advanced AI development pending federal safety rules and directs the U.S. to pursue international agreements; the sponsors cited the Hugging Face hack among its prompts.