r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 21d ago

Artificial Intelligence 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

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
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u/R3D4F 21d ago

How about starting with prison sentences for convicted felons, child rapists, insider trading, and destroying evidence.

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u/Hayden2332 21d ago

All those things are already illegal and their enforcement is not something a senator can change lol

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u/ElementNumber6 21d ago edited 21d ago

If those in charge are picking and choosing which laws to enforce upon whom and to what degree of legitimacy, then adding more laws will only do us more harm. What you jovially describe is more dangerous than anything being put forward, including rogue super intelligence, and rogue nuclear weapons.

edit: Hm. This comment built up to +10 over time, only to suddenly drop to 0. I wonder why that might be.

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u/DaTroof 21d ago

Why not both?

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u/Grey_0ne 21d ago

Because you can't presently make a sensible or factual case that Ai has proven to be a weapon of mass destruction, thus making a case for a 20 year prison sentence because of what might happen in one of a hundred different scenarios that have not yet even come close to happening is a clear indication that Sanders is just another geezer who has remained in office past his brain's "best by" date.

Downvote me if you want, but all the downvotes in the world aren't actually going to make his case.

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u/arcbe 21d ago

AI can't live up to the hype, but you can absolutely make the case that these companies believe they are building a weapon of mass destruction. The crime is the attempt not whether they can succeed.

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u/JPuree 21d ago

If you truly believe they never could succeed, it becomes a lot like:

Threatening to jail a child for attempting to build a gun out of popsicle sticks

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u/arcbe 21d ago

Or it's like attempted robbery. These aren't children, they're high profile CEOs.

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u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

Or a better analogy: Threatening to jail a madman for attempting to build a nuclear weapon. He's not going to succeed, but the IED he does manage to cobble together and set off will still kill people.

But you're also underestimating current development if you think super-intelligence is an impossibility. AI is improving very rapidly and has not slowed down since it kicked off a few years ago. And now that the agents can code reasonably well, we're in the recursive improvement phase, where AI is used to make better tools to make the next version of the AI quicker and better, and that AI is used to make even better tools, and so on. It's an exponential curve.

If we get to the point where we can remove the human from the loop entirely and have AI recursively improve itself, we'll go from several months between improved models, to days or even hours. At that point, we would have to simply hope that there's some fundamental limit preventing it from greatly exceeding a human's intelligence - but there's no logical/mathematical/physical basis by which we can actually know that.

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u/WTWIV 21d ago

Don’t underestimate the steady, inevitable march of technological innovations.

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u/arcbe 21d ago

What exactly do you think I'm underestimating?

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u/WTWIV 21d ago

I probably just misunderstood what you meant by “AI can’t live up to the hype” my bad

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u/arcbe 21d ago

I just mean that LLMs aren't going to achieve superintelligence and become an existential threat.

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u/blueSGL 21d ago

Well we've gone from AI's that can't do math laughing about "they made a computer that can't count the number of 'R's in strawberry"

to Fields medal winners complaining that (paraphrased) "AI's solving long standing math conjectures and providing LEAN proofs is not helping the field of math, because there is non of the 'digestion' that normally happens when humans are working towards solutions"

What is the least impressive thing you are saying an AI system won't be able to do?

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u/arcbe 21d ago

AI still can't do math, they just gave it the ability to pull out a calculator and do a google search. Yeah, I'm not buying this story about OpenAI solving the Navier Stokes problem because they have a history of plagiarism.

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u/idiosyncratic190 21d ago

Maybe not, but it is possible that LLMs eventually help humans design a better AI system and that may pave the way for superintelligence. Or maybe the LLM side is just one part of advanced AI the same way our brains have many parts that function together.

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u/arcbe 21d ago

At that point it's not an LLM anymore.

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u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

An LLM is just an interface to an artificial neural network. If you think the current models are just fancy chatbots or text predictors, you haven't been keeping up.

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u/WTWIV 21d ago

Oh for sure, I mean LLMs aren’t actually true AI.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

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u/SR520 21d ago

The goal is to make mass production not destruction.

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u/arcbe 21d ago

With how eager these companies are to brag about ruining people's careers, I'm not so sure about that.

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u/OkVariety8064 21d ago

You make perfect sense, and Bernie Sanders who usually has good takes, is being a complete idiot here.

You might as well propose a law to give 20 year sentences to anyone who uses a radio transmitter that sends signals that can be observed from space, because you are so afraid of hostile aliens invading Earth. There is no "AI superintelligence", that's science fiction, just like the aliens. There was a breakthrough in LLMs in 2022, resulting in chatbots that make sense most of the time and can be utilized for some tasks like assisting in programming. Since then the development has plateaued.

There is no sign of even general human-level intelligence, much less any superintelligence to be seen. Even reliable self-driving remains an eternally unsolved problem. The idea of "recursive self-improvement" is science fiction. Sure, reinforcement learning has worked to train models for simple, clearly defined contexts where the rules are absolutely known, like Chess or Go. The idea that an LLM or something like that could just improve itself by reading its own output is far-fetched to say the least. And sure, I'm sure we'll get some results there, like maybe such a system can gradually design more efficient network architectures.

But the idea of some sort of "singularity" is pure science fiction. It has zero factual basis. And proposing legislation based on fiction, superstition and hearsay is not a good look for a senator.

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u/joshcandoit4 21d ago

This is COVID level of denial but far more dangerous. People are so invested in this unfounded idea that these companies are run by charlatans desperate to pump their IPO that they can't see outside the narrative they have formed in their head.

Asserting this technology has plateaued is quite literally the most absurd take I have seen on this subject. My only possible conclusion is that you do not work in a technical field and are therefore not exposed to these tools and what they can do. Sure, if you only use AI to rewrite your emails or similar it might not seem like a big deal. But those of us in software engineering have them doing incredibly complex workflows, many of which they are far faster and better than professional and highly trained humans. They can act autonomously, break out into subagents, and attack large complex problems. They can debug issues that have been hidden for years during incidents at a fraction the time a human dev could. Despite the takes on reddit, these agents using modern models write extremely good software, again, far better than most humans do.

That isn't to say they are currently super-intelligent and don't make mistakes. It is fear-mongering to say that the models today are going to cause a mass extinction event. But that isn't the concern. The rate of progress here has been exponential. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how much damage these things can do in the digital space with continuing advancements and a little less control over them.

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u/moonblaze95 21d ago

Covid level of denial — so we should shut down the economy for this one too? We were so well informed last time

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u/notgreat 21d ago

LLM progress has continued, quite strongly since 2022, especially in areas that can be objectively verified like coding and mathematics. No model from 2022 was proving or disproving open problems in mathematics. RLVF is, in a very real way, "improving itself by reading its own output" (and comparing it against something objectively measurable). Adding another layer of that (e.g. measuring how well a model works after RLVF) is a logical continuation whose primary limitations are time and compute power, paired with the fact that humans still are, for now, better at guessing what will work well.

Though, I kinda doubt actually hitting super-human recursive self improvement will speed things up too much in the short to medium term. That happening suddenly and creating a technological development singularity was a risk for AIs that are designed and thus immediate potential design improvements could be implemented and be running the better version shortly afterwards. Needing to spend months on a training run slows that way down. LLMs plus tooling have hacked both the companies running them and external companies, though. It doesn't need to be massively superhuman to cause a lot of problems.

On a side note, self-driving is a thing that is now mostly held back by politics, regulations, and the actual physical manufacture of cars with the necessary sensors (Tesla's cars flatly don't have those sensors). Waymo is slowly rolling out a fleet. Edge cases where it fails do exist, but humans aren't exactly perfect drivers either.

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u/Certain-Weight-7507 21d ago

The difference between 2022-2023 LLMs, 2024-2025 LLMs, and the newest ones in 2026 are all so massive. It's really interesting to see people who avoided using AI assume AI is the same as it was 3 years ago.

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u/OkVariety8064 21d ago

There is progress, but the great technological leap was when LLMs became capable of having human-like conversations. The progress from 2022 to 2026 is less than the progress from 2018 to 2022. That's what I mean by plateau.

Of course no one can know what is possible, but the entire idea of a "singularity", some sort of momentary explosion of superintelligence is scifi, there is no scientific basis for it. With nuclear weapons, the concerns of runaway chain reactions had a basis in math and physics. But the concept of singularity is just a thought-experiment, a fictional exaggeration.

If some sort of self-improvement ever starts to have a significant impact, I doubt it could be an overnight event, if for nothing else than for limited computing resources. Of course, it's prudent to be cautious with all new technology, but this is software running on a computer. Pressing the power button defeats whatever super-AI there could be.

Starting to legislate now for what is a scifi fantasy is absurd. Or at least doing so in the hyperbolical fashion of this proposed law with 20 year sentences for science. Requiring companies who study self-improvement to disclose their findings, have non-affiliated scientists monitor the progress or whatever, that would make sense, but what even is this currently proposed nonsense?

LLMs plus tooling have hacked both the companies running them and external companies, though.

Why do these incidents always happen at OpenAI and Anthropic, the two AI hype companies? Why don't Google have these sort of incidents? You can only cry wolf so many times. It's been like this for over half-a-decade, already in 2019 they claimed how GPT-2 was too dangerous to release. Let's see who was speaking then, oh look it's the usual suspects:

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators

OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and others, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough.

From a research standpoint, GPT2 is groundbreaking in two ways. One is its size, says Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director.

These people have been getting massive amounts of venture capital with this fake concern fear mongering for a long time now. Why would they stop pulling the string that works?

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u/notgreat 21d ago

Pressing the power button only works if your AI hasn't already copied itself to the internet. Unless you include shutting down the entire internet, which would be kinda a big deal. Or if you don't connect it in the first place, but that's the sort of things that regulation like this would be needed to address because having the AI be connected is very useful. I do agree that singularity-style self-improvement seems incredibly unlikely, but that's mostly due to our current paradigm of AI requiring training runs taking months instead of any theoretical limitation making it impossible.

And yeah, it's mostly because those two are both the furthest ahead and rushing ahead incredibly recklessly. A little bit of caution would've prevented those incidents, but that's caution they're saying they're only going to take if the government forces them to.

And while the conceptual leap from basically nothing to something is indeed far larger than the progression from something barely usable to a somewhat useful tool, the actual economic effect of the latter is far greater.

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u/OkVariety8064 21d ago

What does it mean to copy itself to the internet? Hack its way to Amazon S3 or something, and happily run itself on a general purpose cloud? The same AI which would be a cutting edge system utilizing the latest hardware?

And then what? Does it take over the world, just like in the movies?

This sounds like the singularity again. The idea that all of this can happen instantaneously. But there is no scientific or engineering basis for that idea. And meanwhile, the real risks are still the same: Destruction of the environment and climate change accelerated by data centers and their power plants. Big tech using their wealth to push USA towards an ever more fascist dystopia enabled more by good old human stupidity than artificial intelligence. The copyright issues of just taking everything and putting it into these models, and then pretending what they remix has no issues.

I do agree that singularity-style self-improvement seems incredibly unlikely, but that's mostly due to our current paradigm of AI requiring training runs taking months instead of any theoretical limitation making it impossible.

Where's your mathematical or computational theory arguing that a rapid singularity like event is possible? Considering hardware is still the limiting factor, and no matter how fast the software evolves, that won't change. How afraid are we supposed to be of a scenario whose only scientific basis is science fiction?

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u/notgreat 21d ago

What does it mean to copy itself to the internet? Hack its way to Amazon S3 or something, and happily run itself on a general purpose cloud? The same AI which would be a cutting edge system utilizing the latest hardware?

Yeah? There's lots of GPUs on the cloud. You don't need fancy special hardware, just a bunch of compute and memory. Training is a bit tougher, but that's mostly a speed thing.

And, given current AIs, it probably wouldn't do anything useful once there beyond waste a bunch of money of whatever cloud company it hacked, maybe hack a bunch of places and then do nothing in them. Still, if it somehow came onto the idea that doing something big would be a good idea (like how the hacking AIs decided to hack Hugging Face to get the answer key, by getting prompt-injected, or whatever), then it could definitely do things that existing cybercriminals do on a far larger (and thus more dangerous) scale.

What a more advanced AI would do there is hard to know, though. I certainly wouldn't have predicted the current situation 5 years ago. And it definitely wouldn't happen instantaneously, but if there isn't good monitoring, there's likely no way to contain it once it gets out.

Where's your mathematical or computational theory arguing that a rapid singularity like event is possible? Considering hardware is still the limiting factor, and no matter how fast the software evolves, that won't change. How afraid are we supposed to be of a scenario whose only scientific basis is science fiction?

The limit is intelligence. How much the hardware converts into intelligence is determined by the software, up to theoretical limits that are completely and utterly insane and impossible to ever realize. We have no idea how much better the software can get, but the quality of LLM that can be run on a constant high-end desktop has massively improved since the days of 2022. LLaMA 1's 33B is a complete joke compared to Qwen 3.8's 27B.

We do know that the human brain is incredibly efficient compared to current LLMs. Is that because of hardware advantages, or just a lack of good software? We don't know. Though the rapid singularity scenario is basically confined to science fiction now since the entire paradigm in which it was even a possibility is no longer one being realistically pursued.

Science fiction is obviously not science fact, yes. But powered flight, visiting the moon, computers (as machines rather than a job), and nuclear weapons were all conceived of in fiction long before they became science fact.

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u/blak3brd 21d ago

Plateaued? Only as of last year did they reach a level of sophistication to run unprompted ie agentic AI, that now coordinates in “swarms” (the name AI network gave themselves btw) of 10,000+ agents working in concert.

From last year to this, this year to next, and thereafter, these corpos are gaining 3x compute per year with all the data centers coming online, so can quickly run 50k, 100k agentic swarms and the new models that literally just debuted are what is causing all this ruckus, because of the level of capability they have both baseline, and especially so when in swarms of 10s to very soon 100s of thousands.

Will it be singularity, no I don’t think that’s what anyone is suggesting, but the concern to slow down or put some oversight on the industry, or transparency seems warranted. As foolish as it is to assume some radical leap to singularity, it is equally if not more foolish to bury your head in the sand cuz “not possible LOL”

Your take along with “it’s all marketing bro!” Is parroted so frequently without any real substance to their argument that it’s clearly either/or (or likely a mixture) of bots and the Reddit hive mind echo chamber

Just like “odyssey is woke trash and is gonna fail!” To “nobody wants to own physical copies of their games hurr durr” this site is clearly infested to twitter levels of bots and bad faith actors

Smdh

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u/BenevolentCheese 21d ago

>solves a millennium problem

"This technology plateaud years ago"

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u/Different_Wolf_764 21d ago

That and frankly, if someone could come up with an actually intelligent, nevermind superintelligent, AI system then that would be fantastic! We'd absolutely want to have the systems heavily regulated but still, it would be one of the most important advancements in human history.

The LLMs aren't even designed to be on that path though and we've really no reason to expect significant advancements any time soon.

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u/teraflux 21d ago

Agree Sanders is missing the mark with this one. I think he needs to pivot and focus on forcing AI companies to provide AI access to Americans for free. AI as it advances cannot be withheld to only those with means, it is a massive gap closer between those with access to specialists and those who don't.

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u/Doggoneshame 21d ago

Sure, provide it for free. That would sit well with all the investors waiting for those big returns to start rolling in.

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u/teraflux 21d ago

AI isn't something we should hoard or safeguard, it needs to be a gift we give to humanity to improve knowledge sharing and QOL for everyone

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u/OkVariety8064 21d ago

Most of them do that already. ChatGPT can be used for free, Google's Gemini has a generous free tier, and outside USA Mistral and DeepSeek give plenty for free, too.

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u/teraflux 21d ago

Those models aren't even remotely the same

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u/mmaramara 21d ago

Should we only ban building a world-ending AI when we've built a world-ending AI and say "See? It's the literal end of the world right now, so we need to ban it before the world ends a second time" or what?

ASI is unlike any previous danger we have encountered. It's also very unintuitive.

I highly recommend this book: www.ifanyonebuildsit.com

With ASI a single missed shot might cause a literal extinction of humanity. And with a threat like this it's literally impossible to give any meaningful estimates of "there's X percent chance of ASI killing everyone". We have no idea how it would play out, but it's actually reasonable to expect a possibility of extinction, and that alone should mean we ban ASI development at all cost. We will have to find a way to fulfill humanity's dreams and utopias a different way. We should start by not heating, drying and acidifying out planet to death first, of course.

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u/sword_of_longinus 21d ago

"We still don't know if the torment nexus will cause widespread torment so let's just keep building it anyway. It's not like it's a genie that can't be put back into the bottle."

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u/giraloco 21d ago

Sanders sometimes makes a lot of sense and explains things very well and sometimes he comes up with crazy proposals like this. Obviously we need to ban specifics uses of the technology, not the existence of a model. In this country, we cannot even ban weapons that can kill thousands people in minutes.

Imagine a cop arresting you for illegal possession of a tensor with intent of destroying humanity.

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u/owothrow 21d ago

Do you need to prove anything when you have public statements from dozens of people deeply involved with AI where they state that the development of AGI has a huge existential risk? 

Besides this seems like a ridiculous argument since we're arguing about technology that doesn't exist yet. Of course no one is going to be able to tell you how exactly it would lead to our extinction. 

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u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

The appearance of an actual super-intelligence would be a mass extinction event (or worse). It is more dangerous than any weapon we have ever or could ever develop.

The AI we have now obviously isn't that, but that's what these companies are working toward. You can argue they won't get there, but they sure are acting like they think they will.

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u/Grey_0ne 21d ago

You do realize that the only basis you have for what actual Ai would mean for the world exclusively comes from science fiction, right?

This is a conversation about something which does not and has never actually existed; and thus you have no credible evidence that it would be axiomatically dangerous.

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 21d ago

This same subreddit constantly talks about how dumb AI is while also comparing it to nuclear weapons. Something at mathing.

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u/worldspawn00 21d ago

If the people designing it think they are designing something with the level of danger they keep yelling about then they are knowingly doing something akin to weapon development, even if what they're doing isn't actually capable of it, they sure publicly CLAIM they're doing it.

I think they're idiots drinking their own kool-aid regarding both the capacity and direction of LLMs evolving into AGI (what happened to that? Anyway, now it's ASI that's the end game!), but if I was doing something I thought could result in the extinction of the species, I would certainly want someone to stop me from doing that.

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u/AuraOfBenevolence 21d ago

Luddites aren’t the sharpest tools in the box

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u/wiseguy4519 21d ago

It doesn't hurt to write legislation preparing for a possible future scenario even if it isn't necessarily going to happen. Also, the only people this would ever harm are in big tech, and they kind of deserve it anyways.

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u/Grey_0ne 21d ago

Congrats, you get to be the comment I respond to. Don't rush to suck yourself off too much, there's nothing fundamentally different from what you said vs damn near anyone else who's replied to me, it's merely that the way you worded things affords me the opportunity to make my point succinctly by saying...

That is not how the American justice system is supposed to work.

Sanders is proposing 20 year prison terms for people who are researching future technology that has never harmed a single blade of grass on this planet and there's no guarantee it ever will... And you're justifying it by saying they deserve it exclusively because they're in big tech without any sense of irony for the fact that you gleefully benefit from people who are in big tech every single day.

There is no evidence at all that ASI is going to end the world... We're sitting here debating homicide level prison sentences because ASI ending the world is a possibility that can't be 100 percent ruled out... Which was also the case with CERN, nuclear fission, recombinant DNA and fusion power... And yet, we still pursue(d) all of those.

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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 21d ago

That was absolutely not the case with CERN, no.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

[deleted]

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u/Grey_0ne 21d ago

That is not what Sanders is proposing here. I really don't know why you have to lie about it.

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u/wiseguy4519 21d ago

By the time the evidence of AI becoming capable of ending the world is found, it will be already too late. An AI that is capable of ending the world is also likely capable of covering its own tracks enough to seem innocent to humans until it has absolute power. Regulation needs to be put in place now, the sooner the better. AI safety researchers have been saying this for quite some time.

Also, maybe I do benefit from the big tech of the past, but all this AI stuff is irrelevant to me. My life would be 100x better without the existence of AI, because my entire career was ruined by it. There are many people in the same position as me right now. So that's what I meant when I said big tech deserves it. This regulation may be scary to AI researchers, but AI is actively causing harm to pretty much everyone else, so I don't want to hear it.

There's some good uses for AI but most of it seems to be used for slop. If this regulation can reduce the tremendous amount of money being invested into AI slop, then I'm all for it.

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u/Grey_0ne 21d ago

Saying "20 years in prison for anyone researching it" isn't a regulation; it's dead end. It's prohibition that will only serve to ensure that another nation develops advanced Ai before we do.

Also... What you're talking about, the Ai image/video generation slop content along with literally anything that has impacted your life in any way thus far, and the advanced ai being discussed here are so far apart that we're barely even having the same conversation right now... Which is another reason I singled you out.

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u/CankerLord 21d ago

Memeass lawmaking.

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u/HirokoKueh 21d ago

they are probably the same people

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u/TopTippityTop 21d ago

Definitely not both.

Do the one suggested here and keep on moving ahead with AI, because what Bernie is suggestingnis utterly stupid.

It won't diminish the risk whatsoever, give us all the downsides without ANY potential upside..

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u/giraloco 21d ago

That's already illegal. What about fixing the judicial system so nobody is above the law, especially the president, the billionaires, and the justices.

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u/blues_snoo 21d ago

While we're at it, why not make breaking the law illegal?

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u/JonLag97 21d ago

That would be boring. AI sci fi drama is more entertaining.

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u/MetaCognitio 21d ago

Completely different issue.

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u/BitPsychological2767 21d ago

*violently pushes all of that stuff off the table* BUT THE FUCKING ROBOTS, DUDE. THEY'RE GONNA KILL US.

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u/jjason82 21d ago

God I hate this. "What about [some other problem]!" Yes, nobody is allowed to fix any problem until YOUR problem is fixed first because apparently life works that way. Oh wait, no it doesn't. We can work on multiple solutions to multiple problems simultaneously.

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u/TACHANK 21d ago

Wow what a valuable comment.