# Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans — penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons — retained record > Retained news record from news:toms-hardware. Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/589d6daf66809049 [← sources](https://highsignal.app/data) source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:toms-hardware) published 2026-09-13 14:10 ingested 2026-09-13 17:17 [original source ↗](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons) ## retained text ``` Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans — penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons Scale of penalty matches that facing rogue nuclear weapon designers. Senators Bernie Sanders and Greg Cezar have announced their Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Seeking to pause advanced AI development, the legislation’s stick is pretty severe. Penalties facing entities/developers who violate the pauses and prohibitions in the bill could face up to 20 years in prison. That’s a sentence on a par with someone found guilty of designing a rogue nuclear weapon. The news is suddenly filled with grave concerns about AI becoming too powerful. It could even threaten the future of humanity. Moreover, it might surprise casual observers that AI industry leaders like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk appear to agree. With this threat on the horizon, politicians are keen to introduce legislation to protect the citizens they serve. According to USA Today, the Sanders bill “is the most extreme AI-related legislation to date.” It likely faces strong opposition in Congress, particularly among enterprise-supporting Democrats and Trump-aligned Republicans. However, with recent statements from industry leaders seemingly harmonizing with calls to slow down AI development and in favor of greater oversight/regulation, we could see politicians agree on something for a change. Back to the Ban Artificial Superintelligence and Temporarily Pause Advanced AI Development bill and its specific wording, we note that it is advised that the government set up a new cabinet-level federal agency "to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence, including by enforcing a prohibition on artificial superintelligence." As well as setting harsh penalties in the U.S., it is proposed that work be done to "ban superintelligence around the world" via international agreements, allied coordination, and so on. Full speed ahead, or hit the brakes? There remain plenty of interesting arguments on both sides of the AI progress divide. It is difficult to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t keep going as fast as it can, as a matter of national security, for example. On the other hand, the whole of humanity being wiped from the face of the Earth by opening Pandora’s AI box of tricks makes geopolitical concerns seem like minor grumbles. We’ve seen some other theories about why the AI barons are suddenly in favor of regulation. Some critics say they may be running out of road, unable to balance private investments with credible paths to profitability. Thus, they now want to move away from a commercially funded model to a government-funded ‘Manhattan Project II,’ with their terrifyingly powerful AI being guarded by the state. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. - pjmelect It annoys me when I see comments like this as if the USA is the whole world, while a ban maybe implemented in America the rest of the world will take no notice.Reply - USAFRet Reply Not saying Sanders is 100% correct, but maybe the world should come to some sort of agreement, like what happened with nuclear weapons.pjmelect said:It annoys me when I see comments like this as if the USA is the whole world, while a ban maybe implemented in America the rest of the world will take no notice. - MrK26 You don't need advanced technology for this. You can already build and tweak AI models at home. Totally different than nukes. These restrictions are reckless panic and show he is ignorant on what we actually are dealing with.Reply New local models don't need giant datacenters, they run just fine at home and there are already ones that'll tell you anything you want, no guardrails at all. It's already done, people know, just not obvious to the mainstream yet. The companies also desperately want regulation so they can lock in their ownership as stewards of this tech in America. Bernie just thinks everything should be regulated and debated, consequences be damned. - USAFRet Reply And these local models get their data from...where?MrK26 said:You don't need advanced technology for this. You can already build and tweak AI models at home. Totally different than nukes. These restrictions are reckless panic and show he is ignorant on what we actually are dealing with. New local models don't need giant datacenters, they run just fine at home and there are already ones that'll tell you anything you want, no guardrails at all. It's already done, people know, just not obvious to the mainstream yet. The companies also desperately want regulation so they can lock in their ownership as stewards of this tech in America. Bernie just thinks everything should be regulated and debated, consequences be damned. - USAFRet Reply Cool.MrK26 said:New local models don't need giant datacenters, they run just fine at home and there are already ones that'll tell you anything you want, no guardrails at all. It's already done, people know, just not obvious to the mainstream yet. So we can now dispense with all these companies building these big DC's? - timsSOFTWARE ReplyUSAFRet said:Not saying Sanders is 100% correct, but maybe the world should come to some sort of agreement, like what happened with nuclear weapons. If they really wanted to stop AI, they'd need to stop developing more powerful computer hardware and building datacenters. Do that, and they'd stop the AI as well. Fundamentally, AI algorithms are just a different way to build a function. In math, or in traditional programming, you have a function a human created by hand, that takes some explicitly listed inputs, performs some operations on the inputs, and outputs a result. With neural networks/deep learning, you replace writing the algorithm by hand, with finding a close enough approximation through iterative adjustment. Instead of named function parameters chosen by a human, you have a vast quantity of unnamed ones, and instead of doing different math operations, you just do multiplies and approximate all other operations just by having a large enough quantity of weights. It enables solving otherwise intractable problems - like replicating human thought patterns as they apply to writing - at scale by having enough compute. Trying to stop AI development is just not realistic - it's a natural evolution of computer science, and it's not even a new idea/way of solving problems, as most of the ideas behind it are relatively old; it just wasn't feasible to deploy at scale until now. - MrK26 ReplyUSAFRet said:And these local models get their data from...where? The model IS the data. It's self-contained, that's what the training phase of a model is. You don't need to get data from anywhere; there are already open-weight (think open source) local models anyone can download. E.g., here's a qwen3.8 model (about as good as Anthropic's Opus 4.6) and you can run without an internet connection: https://huggingface.co/huihui-ai/Huihui-Qwen3.8-27B-abliterated GPUs to run this are up to $1k now, but there are millions and millions of gamers with the power to download, start it on a computer locally, and it'll tell you anything you want to know. We're already done here folks, lol. Way past, best get to figuring out how to use the tech to harden systems, like my company does. - MrK26 Reply Honestly, probably won't need them, yes.USAFRet said:Cool. So we can now dispense with all these companies building these big DC's? - USAFRet Reply I completely get what you're saying.MrK26 said:The model IS the data. It's self-contained, that's what the training phase of a model is. You don't need to get data from anywhere; there are already open-weight (think open source) local models anyone can download. E.g., here's a qwen3.8 model (about as good as Anthropic's Opus 4.6) and you can run without an internet connection: https://huggingface.co/huihui-ai/Huihui-Qwen3.8-27B-abliterated GPUs to run this are up to $1k now, but there are millions and millions of gamers with the power to download, start it on a computer locally, and it'll tell you anything you want to know. We're already done here folks, lol. Way past, best get to figuring out how to use the tech to harden systems, like my company does. But also, this is running on data current as of today. Next week, next year.... ``` document fetched 2026-09-14 02:47 · canonical https://tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons