Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have called for a ban on artificial superintelligence. Their proposed legislation would criminalize AI systems matching or exceeding human cognitive abilities, with sentences of up to 20 years in prison. On August 2, 2026, Casar declared AI safety an emergency and called for congressional hearings. On August 10, Sanders sent letters to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta demanding a pause in frontier AI development. In March 2026, Sanders had already teamed up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to propose an AI Data Center Moratorium Act, as well as a public fund financed by a one-time 50% tax on major AI companies.
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