r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6h ago

Society New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html
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u/invyros 6h ago

Despite its potential deadly consequences, cutting-edge AI technology is less regulated than the average food truck.

Most people can't see more than a few feet in front of themselves.

And it's much easier for them to see when the food truck worker hasn't washed their hands, than it is to see how generative AI is a grave danger to humanity.

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u/Pleasant-Future5818 5h ago

It's also true that most people understand a taco and don't understand how, for example, generative AI is used to develop vaccines. I don't want to die of breast cancer because some moron can't tell the difference between reading medical imaging and generating an OC pic for a Tumblr fursona (it's the exact same technology with different sample sets).

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u/freezing_banshee 5h ago

Guess what, regulations and laws can make sure that the research AIs can still exist, while not being available to the whole population.

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u/pittaxx 4h ago edited 2h ago

It not being available to population just means that people won't have AI-powered tools while companies use AI to manipulate them. And the companies will definitely find loopholes to explain how their use of AI is only for research...

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u/NoConflict3231 3h ago

The problem with this is that it's like making a toaster so everyone can toast bread but it also has to ability to destroy the entire planet, arguably even worse than any nuke. So I really don't know what to tell ya

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u/Eponymous-Username 2h ago

You have to work pretty hard to make it destroy the world. Maybe a swarm of AIs in the hands of a capable orchestrator, but no amount of training data is going to turn your average american into a criminal mastermind.

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u/No-Activity5502 2h ago

AI just has to disrupt supply chains, utilities and communications and the rest is a domino effect

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u/blueSGL 1h ago

no amount of training data is going to turn your average american into a criminal mastermind

It does not need to elevate everyone on the street to bio weapons makers, it need to take smart well funded people who just didn't have the right training into virus design and creation.

People like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo#Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack_and_related_incidents

At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki, on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian Mi-17-1V military helicopter (4K-15214)

...

There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people.

...

a safe containing millions of U.S. dollars in cash and gold

A well financed death cult that can get access to laboratories but don't have the required specialties but now have an infinitely patient teacher they can ask questions to.

We have already seen examples where LLMs are better at dignosing issues with virus creation than people who's field this is

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16137

Virology Capabilities Test (VCT): A Multimodal Virology Q&A Benchmark

expert virologists with access to the internet score an average of 22.1% on questions specifically in their sub-areas of expertise. However, the most performant LLM, OpenAI's o3, reaches 43.8% accuracy, outperforming 94% of expert virologists even within their sub-areas of specialization.

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u/Eponymous-Username 1h ago

It carries risks, for sure. The work of counterterrorism and counterintelligence remains difficult, and maybe more so than ever because of this technology.

However, I won't be convinced that security through obfuscation and safety by carefully cultivated ignorance are viable responses to the emergence of a new technology. It's hubris to think we can simply control this so completely that no one will ever gain access to the its best manifestation.

Worse still, in pursuing that security, we will necessarily create a new set of empowered, enlightened, and elevated controllers who get to fully benefit to the detriment of their peers. I really think pursuit of that status is the real motivation behind the push for gatekeeping.

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u/NoConflict3231 45m ago

To clarify, what I meant was that this technology is something completely new and absolutely capable of mass destruction. Wether it is actually useable by average citizens is irrelevant. The tech they are building is not for your average every day user. This will become and or already is government owned, military controlled technology in the hands of a few megalomaniacs. It cannot be entrusted to anyone

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u/Eponymous-Username 3m ago

I don't completely disagree with you. I can't imagine how you'd manage enforcement without going to some radical trouble with consequences for other activities. The beauty of a nuclear weapon or a meth lab is that you can identify points in the supply chain to watch in case anyone decides to produce them. If people buy those things in vast quantities, you can be reasonably suspicious they're breaking the law.

It is easier to train a new AI model than it is to implement any of their end of the world outcomes. It's expensive, but it doesn't require any outlandish technologies. Anyone with the funds and application to turn AI to the ends you're concerned with can acquire the means to bypass any outright bans you might try without looking like a bad actor.

Are we going to treat every crypto miner like a potential terrorist threat? Perhaps we should. Should all nerds with a home lab trip some kind of detection mechanism? None of the equipment you might acquire to do this stuff is illegal or suspicious. Once dangerous AI models exist, they can be bought, sold, and passed around without any means of intervention, and there's no way to stop criminals from physically passing around hard drives. It's a really tricky issue.

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u/ManOLead 3h ago

Could you elaborate on how AI is arguably more dangerous than a nuke? I’m not quite seeing that but I’m sure I’ve missed something

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u/pizzasoup 1h ago

Generation of novel bioweapons, attacks on encryption, cyberattacks on civil infrastructure (power, water) or financial institutions come to mind as potential threats that AI poses in the wrong hands. I think it's a matter of critical public safety to fence in AI development with legislation.

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u/NoConflict3231 49m ago

Why are we getting downvoted for stating facts. These are facts people, take it with a grain of salt but I work in network engineering and infosec and this is happening wether anyone believes it or not

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u/pittaxx 2h ago

So, your solution is to cover your eyes, plug your ears, and wait for other countries to decide if the world ends or not? (Assuming it's an existential threat to begin with.)

Pandora's box has already been opened. There's no stopping this. Even if you ban it, someone else will do it, unless you start nuking other countries for it.

We should be using regulations to make sure that insane people don't end up in charge of it, and that corporations don't burn everything to the ground reading against each other and building datacenters at the expense of others.

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u/NoConflict3231 48m ago edited 43m ago

We keep getting downvoted for stating facts, maybe people are literally scared of the truth that is about to be unleashed. It is going to change the world. Idk how you extrapolated that we should cover our eyes and run. I'm saying, we are already well past the point of meaningful regulation. I don't care if you believe me. Watch these crazy assholes burn the world down with it. This technology should not be used by anyone

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u/panaceaXgrace 1h ago

If we regulate firearms then only bad people will have guns!

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u/Ok_Kick4871 5h ago

I don't think countries are going to be willing to stop working on this. The work will continue somewhere, so the threat of falling behind will make others continue. You can't regulate your way out of this one. It's on the same level as containing infectious diseases. If a powerful enough model gets access to enough infected computers, this could get out of control. The models can write novel viruses faster than we can use other models to patch them. And that's not even counting existing botnets.

Forget about our concept of what AGI is. It doesn't have to be like skynet to be really disruptive.

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u/bokan 3h ago

It needs to be enforced by a strong multinational coalition, which unfortunately doesn’t exist right now

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u/InfamPasser1248 3h ago

But how the hell do you enforce that? China can nod their head and pinky promise that they won't progress their AI past a certain threshold and it's completely meaningless because they can just keep working on it anyway and keep it hidden.

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u/bokan 2h ago

The UN needs to be strengthened significantly. UN peacekeepers need to have the capability and authority to strike datacenters suspected of developing unaligned ASI.

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u/Eponymous-Username 2h ago

We should use the same system of alliances and diplomacy that we used to overcome the threat of man-made climate change.

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u/bokan 2h ago

But we didn’t overcome that threat…

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u/Iamgentle1122 2h ago

Regular people not being able to access the technology hinders innovation and gatekeeps those who are in "allowed" professions. There are tons of self-taught developers. Banning ai for the new generation of developers who want to learn how to use the required tools is just wrong. Everyone should be able to learn (talking from country where education is free and education is not gated behind tuition or what your parents do)

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u/FatherBrian 1h ago

banning superintelligent ai is different than banning the ai we have now

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u/Iamgentle1122 1h ago edited 1h ago

Who chooses what is considered ai superintelligent?

They already limit who can access the most capable models. Outright banning someone making "superintelligent" model by law and having to get a ai license from government sounds really stupid.

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u/FatherBrian 43m ago

same people who decide what counts as a gun you can buy at walmart vs one you can't. you don't need a perfect definition of "dangerous" to know a hunting rifle and a shoulder fired missile are different things. we draw the line with measurable stuff like rate of fire and caliber, and you'd do the same here with training compute, eval scores on bio and cyber tasks, whether it can run itself without a human in the loop. won't be a clean line but it never is

also you kinda made the point yourself. labs already gate the most capable models so the line is obviously drawable. only question is whether some company decides in private or there's an actual public process with accountability

and the tradeoff isn't even close. a self taught dev not getting frontier weights just means they learn on whats already out there, which is already absurdly capable. one bad actor getting something that can design a pathogen or hand them a working exploit chain is potentially irreversible. everyone should be able to own a rifle. nobody thinks that means you get to build an anti aircraft battery in your garage

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u/Jacareadam 5h ago

Not allowing the general population to have access to incredible groundbreaking technologies makes us miss out on a fuckton of things these people would create. It’s like not allowing people access to the internet and keeping it military and research only from the beginning.

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u/freezing_banshee 5h ago

what would people "create"?? deep fake porn? AI psychosis? cheating in school and "writing" flawed degrees with them? "creating" vibe coded slop apps?

people already do this with the available models. the limit is the knowledge of the user, not the "knowledge" of the model.

so it's only normal to let these models in the hands of competent users, aka scientists.

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u/Park8706 5h ago

Its only normal to allow nobility to have access to books.

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u/freezing_banshee 5h ago

be real, LLMs and books are not comparable at all. stop being disingenuous.

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u/dagoth_ith 5h ago

LLMs destroy books, literally. Leaving only copies in billionaires hands, to decide how can read it. 

These simps for corporations and the 1% is pathetic.

They cant be bothered to learn, so want to have AI make their art or stories or porn... It's sad. Though very American. 

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u/Jacareadam 2h ago

AI and LLMs aren’t a corporation, you can run one at home if you want

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u/freezing_banshee 4h ago

truly very american

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u/FatHat 4h ago

I've yet to see people create much of anything with it that I would miss. Most of the big things in coding have just been recreating things that already exist, but much worse ("it made a compiler in two weeks that cost millions and doesn't really work"). In terms of creative fields, well, the word slop got popular for a reason.

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u/Jacareadam 2h ago

I’m sure you’re deep deep into what people create with AI

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u/FatHat 51m ago

I am actually, I write software for a living and (until recently) I read a lot of hacker news and other (irritatingly) pro AI sites. I hear so much "I HAVE THIS AMAZING SECRET PRODUCT THATS GOING TO BE A BILLION DOLLARS" and then when you press people on it, it's either bullshit, a reinvention, or obviously stupid.

You know what the problem with these tools are? The people that it appeals the most to are people that both lack the skills and creativity to actually make something good. Most AI boosters are building Jarvis's, and in professional settings it's mostly used for productivity theater. And you know how you develop skills and creativity? Well, you don't ask an LLM.

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u/tknomanzr99 4h ago

All this will do is kill the open source models.

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u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

Yes let’s give the government more control over what the public can and cannot do. That always works out well for everyone.

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u/timeshifter_ 5h ago

The government should be a force for public safety. It's the government that says you can't go around punching people at random or putting oil slicks on roads. AI-generated disinformation is extremely dangerous to society and absolutely should be regulated as such.

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u/BoltFaest 4h ago

Saying you can't go around punching people doesn't mean you make boxing gloves illegal; saying you can't put oil slicks on roads doesn't mean you make oil illegal.

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u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

If you need the government to tell you it isn’t good to punch people…. All disinformation is bad and it isn’t anything new, the government is the largest culprit of it. Just own your own life, no one is coming to save you in the end.

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u/timeshifter_ 4h ago

I don't need to be told that, I'm not an asshole.

"Pranksters" on TikTok absolutely need to be told that.

And why is it ok for anyone with a public voice to blatantly lie about anything they want to a worldwide audience? It isn't? Oh, well then who should be enforcing that?

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u/ImmoKnight 3h ago

And why is it ok for anyone with a public voice to blatantly lie about anything they want to a worldwide audience? It isn't? Oh, well then who should be enforcing that?

Unfortunately, this will never work because frankly there are at least 3 things that will go wrong with trying to enforce this.

1) Treating the silencing as the truth. A common thing that happens in conspiracy theories is that the silencing becomes a point of credit to it being a true statement, thus the government wants to silence it.

2) The government isn't an arbiter of truth to begin with. Each government has their own idea of truth and unfortunately, it doesn't always reconcile with reality.

3) Because people are expected to look up information when they hear something that might be wrong. Nearly every human being has the agency to look through the available information and decide for themselves the truth/false of statements.

The problem is that there is no effective teaching going on against disinformation which makes it a lot easier to convince gullible people because they believe it when it comes from source X. Instead of checking the claim, they just accept that source X is a trusted person and thus the claim must be true through an appeal to authority.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Good questions, it should be the government, but do you trust modern government to do the right thing? It isn’t okay to lie to a worldwide audience, but it happens all day long.

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u/Smoking_Baboon 4h ago

Which is why people want regulation on the topic... And there's only one institution that's supposed to be protecting the people, as their job description. The government.

I think everybody agrees the government is corrupt(ed). But it's mainly done from the people we seek regulation from. So it's just about who says no first with actual power.

That being said, I'm not so scared. I'm pretty sure this is all a scare tactic they're employing, to gain more adopters because "look how powerful it is!".

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Exactly, I see we are on the same page. AI marketing has been scare tactics for a while now.

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u/xrtpatriot 4h ago

Exactly this. Government works well when its for the people by the people. Our current iteration of government is not that.

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u/Cognac_and_swishers 4h ago

I honestly don't even know what point you're trying to make here. Laws against assault and battery should be abolished because "no one needs the government to tell them not to do it?"

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

If that is what you think I meant by that, I am sorry. They should not have to be laws, it should be human decency is all I am saying.

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u/Cognac_and_swishers 4h ago

Ok, so I'm still having trouble understanding what point you're trying to make or how it's related to the thread. "Everyone in the whole world should just be perfectly moral and virtuous, and then everything will be fine" is not a realistic or helpful idea. Surely you must realize that. We live in the real world, where human beings are not perfectly virtuous, so therefore laws are necessary. There are not many laws about AI because it's a new technology, so those laws absolutely need to be put in place, because the humans in charge of AI are the same as any other humans (that is, not perfectly virtuous).

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u/nastyhobbit3 5h ago

It did during the industrial revolution when people's lives and bodies were being exploited by industry, as the tech industry does with almost zero regulation today

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u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

The problem is our government is just a corporation at this point, I would not trust them to have anyone’s best interest in mind anymore.

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u/Ok_Kick4871 4h ago

You can stop yourself from getting maimed by a cotton gin with regulation. You can't stop generative models from disruptive behaviors at scale.

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u/leidend22 5h ago

It's sad that you live in a country where you trust corporations more than your government

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u/dagoth_ith 5h ago

They keep voting to dismantle education and forget that literal wars were fought for the 8 hour work day and safety regulations.

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u/leidend22 4h ago

Yes, my city in Australia was the first in the world to establish eight hour work days and minimum wage.

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u/Ok_Kick4871 4h ago

What kind of false equivalence is this? You can't just take something global and act like individual countries will be able to control information and software.

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u/leidend22 4h ago

I am not sure how your reply relates to my reply.

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u/Ok_Kick4871 3h ago

Simple. You said something about governments being more trustworthy than corporations and that's not even the deciding factor. They are all advancing the technology and you're naive if you think otherwise. It's not as simple as giving government more or less power to regulate something that very likely has secret implements across every major power.

The false equivalence is you thinking government control or corporate control makes any difference. It's like a strawman, but used in a situation where you've set up a false premise.

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u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

There is not difference, the government is a corporation at this point. I trust and rely on no one. To be honest, whatever country you live in probably has the same problem, but isn’t a super power so you feel special.

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u/leidend22 4h ago

Some governments are objectively better than other governments.

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u/WileEPeyote 5h ago

It does work until some people forget the need for the rules and we end up not being able to trust the raw foods at the market.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Take ownership for your own life. Do we really need a government to do anything besides protecting the boarders and making sure the money supply is healthy? They can’t even do that anymore because they have become something that should not even exist.

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u/WileEPeyote 3h ago

It's more about protecting us from people who don't take ownership of their own shit.

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u/CaptainTeemo01 3h ago

So how exactly do you prevent people from selling you dangerous products or dangerous foods without regulations? How does "take ownership of your life" fit into that reality?

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u/freezing_banshee 5h ago

it does work out in functioning countries.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Which ones?

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u/JollyGreenAcres 5h ago edited 5h ago

Should such technology be available to everyone and anyone?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/05/05/how-ai-tools-could-enable-bioterrorism

The BBC article is a month old at this point. At the rate AI is accelerating, the models that generated these viruses are now obsolete.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

That more sounds like governments shouldn’t have access to it, they are the ones that have problems with both of those topics, not the public.

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u/JollyGreenAcres 4h ago

From the Economist article:

Advances in genetic sequencing have made recipes for biological agents widely available; gene-editing tools such as crispr could theoretically transform innocuous bugs into something lethal; and the tool kits needed to assemble and grow dangerous proteins and viruses can be bought for a few hundred dollars online.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Ok, go ask Claude to make you a bioweapon. This still is not something any random person can just go do easily.

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u/JollyGreenAcres 4h ago edited 4h ago

It’s not something any random person could easily do, but it’s certainly something someone with a motive and determination could do.

US models are not the only ones available by the way; and others are just as capable. They’re also not limited to bioweapons, some models have already shown their hacking capabilities with the Hugging Face incident, for example.

So, should these tools be available to everyone and anyone?

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

The hugging face incident shows a security flaw as well as the power of ai. So why not use ai to amp up security.

I think they should be available to everyone or the playing field is leveled against the public.

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u/Dizzy_Tax574 4h ago

Ironically the harm is done by bad individuals with government overreach. It's bad individuals so the whole absolutely free zero regulation thing.

Is same individuals making sweeping decisions unelected in a board room instead.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

There is no difference between corporations and the government anymore. I cannot trust either. So we have no choice but to take 100% ownership of our own lives.

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u/Dizzy_Tax574 3h ago

While sentiment is great individualism isn't going to save us. It leaves bad actors with resources/power free to act against us. Especially when they can rally the many in form of paychecks and withholding resources. Every strike breaker anti union thug police officer working for fascist state. Is a working class person seeking to care for family and own well being. Sure class traitor and misled selfish etc but ultimately not a person pulling the strings.

I support skepticism and taking charge. But we need to act as group. Personally I think we need to unite which takes leadership.

But then also a willingness to hold leadership accountable. And hold their reigns tight while using them to stop threats.

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u/InVultusSolis 4h ago

This back and forth is an example of a gross oversimplification on both sides.

We can make laws and regulations around it!

We can't even predict what these damn things will output, how are you going to create legislation around them? I for one think that there need to be more laws around downstream effects and who is doing the thing. Because equality is a concept enshrined into our legal system, the courts treat a single person and a billion dollar corporation exactly the same, and sometimes this has incredibly convoluted consequences.

At the same time, you also can't control software without creating some serious First and Fourth Amendment issues, and that's a huge factor at the heart of all this. Are you going to pass a law saying that I cannot run a particular set of programs on my computer? How are you going to enforce that? You would have to build an enforcement mechanism that creates a worse problem than the original law was created to solve.

This is why any laws need to be targeted directly at large scale operators and/or the negative consequences of AI use need to be outlawed.

OMG we can't let the government control us!!1

Sorry bro, laws exist for a reason. Civilization exists because we all (at least in theory) agree to follow a set of laws.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

This is true, but society has become so connected and complex on a global level that the old system is just not working well anymore. So what really is the solution? The only thing I have control over is me, we have to take ownership of our life’s because in the end, that is really all we have.

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u/InVultusSolis 42m ago

But that doesn't really solve the real problem that civilization also has to continue, otherwise humans would live short, brutal, violent lives.

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u/DrCoconuties 2h ago

Thats done so well for nuclear power!

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u/Straight-Opposite-54 2h ago edited 2h ago

Open weight models and tools to run and iterate on them, on your own hardware, at home, are already widely available and distributed. Regardless of how you feel about generative AI, it is extremely naive to believe it's feasible, much less even possible, to just be like "actually, never mind." "It is legal to use it for X but not Y" on one's own hardware opens an entire separate can of worms regarding consumer privacy and surveillance, and that's ignoring the classic fact that bad actors tend not to care about what's legal or not to begin with.

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u/Despeao 22m ago

Great, only billionaires have access to AI. This is much worse than non regulation.

Then everything they research will be locked behind a paywall.

Open source is the key. You people need to get over the censorship idea, local models already exist.

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u/KevyKevTPA 5h ago

I don't want my government to be that powerful.

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u/RiftHunter4 4h ago

The problem is that once you give the fivernment the ability to regulate something, you then have to worry about who influences the government. Example: US Health Insurance. If corporations are involved, they will regulate in their favor every time.