Ten House Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California, have publicly backed legislation that would ban artificial superintelligence, giving the Sanders-Casar proposal its first visible bloc of House support three weeks after it was introduced, the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday night.
The bill, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and in the House by Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), would ban artificial superintelligence — defined in the legislation as an AI model that "exceeds human cognitive performance and capabilities across most domains or tasks" — and create a federal Department of Artificial Intelligence to regulate advanced systems.
When AI Buzz Wire covered the bill's introduction in early September, its fate looked like a messaging exercise: sweeping in ambition, short on co-sponsors, and facing near-certain opposition from both industry and the majority party. The new list of House backers does not change the arithmetic of passage, but it changes the politics. A ban on superintelligence is no longer a two-person cause; it is now the official position of at least a dozen members of Congress.
Who is backing the ban
According to the Washington Examiner, several "prominent House leftists" joined Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna in supporting the measure, which the outlet describes as a ban on artificial superintelligence paired with the creation of a new federal department. The full list of ten House Democrats was not itemized in the report's public text, but the presence of Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna — two of the most recognizable names in the House progressive caucus — signals that the proposal has moved from a Sanders-Casar statement project into a genuine factional position within the Democratic Party.
It also aligns with the left flank's broader AI agenda. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have previously joined forces on proposals for a moratorium on AI data center construction, and Khanna has positioned himself as one of the chamber's most active legislators on tech accountability. The superintelligence ban extends that framework from where AI is built to whether its most advanced form should be built at all.
What the bill would do
The legislation's central provision is a permanent legal line: no entity would be permitted to build or deploy a system that exceeds human cognitive performance across most domains. The definition matters — by targeting capability thresholds rather than specific techniques, the bill aims to regulate a class of system rather than a snapshot of today's technology.
The proposed Department of Artificial Intelligence would house federal oversight of advanced models, a structural upgrade from the current patchwork of voluntary commitments, safety institutes, and sector-by-sector regulation. Critics have called the department an enormous expansion of federal power over software development; supporters argue that only a dedicated agency can meaningfully evaluate systems whose failure modes are national in scale.
As reported when the bill was introduced, the proposal also calls for a temporary pause on advanced AI development — a demand Sanders framed as giving society time to decide, deliberately, whether to cross the superintelligence threshold. International coordination is part of the pitch: Sanders has urged governments worldwide to work together to prevent such systems from being built, framing runaway AI as a global coordination problem.
The political math
The bill faces steep odds. Republicans control the Senate, the White House has pushed a light-touch, infrastructure-first AI agenda, and industry groups have warned that banning capability milestones would cede ground to China — an argument that gained force this year as Chinese labs shipped competitive open-weight frontier models. Even among Democrats, the proposal sits well outside the party's mainstream, which has coalesced around transparency rules, safety testing, and market structure rather than hard capability limits.
But the legislation is not really aimed at this Congress. It is aimed at the agenda of the next one — and at the industry's own trajectory, as our AI policy news coverage has tracked all year. Each rogue-agent incident, each disclosed safety failure, and each government review of a frontier model gives the ban's backers a fresh exhibit. This summer alone, lawmakers have pressed OpenAI and Anthropic for testimony over rogue AI agents, state legislatures have advanced their own frontier-model review regimes, and the White House has begun inserting itself into which countries' testers get access to new models first.
That is the context in which ten House Democrats decided a superintelligence ban was worth their name. However remote passage remains in 2026, the bill now functions as a marker: the first formal legislation in either chamber to say, in statutory language, that there is a line past which machine cognition should not go — and that a new federal department should enforce it.
Whether that marker gathers more co-sponsors, or fades after the midterms, will say a great deal about how much the rogue-agent summer actually shifted Congress's appetite for hard limits on AI.
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