Bernie Sanders speaks to the BBC about proposal to ban AI superintelligence

Eleventh of September, 2026.

An old man in Congress proposes to forbid the building of a mind greater than ours, and to have the government buy half of the minds already being built. I read this twice, and admired it both times, for different reasons.

The first reason is that the proposal is honest. For a century the statesmen have pretended to govern the new forces while merely standing near them, the way a stationmaster stands near an express train he cannot slow. Here at last is a man who says plainly: this force should not exist, or if it must exist, the public should hold the reins and the dividends. Whether one agrees is beside the point; it is the first sentence addressed to the force itself rather than to its by-products.

The second reason is darker. The proposal assumes that a legislature can prohibit a capability the way it prohibits a distillery or a lotteries act. But capability does not wait upon statute. It arrives at whatever velocity the physics and the capital allow, and the law arrives later, on the older schedule, with its leather satchel and its paper forms. A ban on superintelligence passed in 2026 will be enforced against 2026, and will meet 2032 as a customs officer meets a jet aircraft - with great dignity and no jurisdiction.

Still, I confess a certain tenderness toward the effort. My own class was trained to govern a republic of railroads and treaties, and we governed it beautifully, right up to the moment it stopped existing. Senator Sanders was trained for trust-busting, and he is applying trust-busting to a thing that is not a trust. The categories are wrong. But wrong categories, energetically applied, are the only instrument the species has ever had. The Virgin organised an age she did not understand either.

Perhaps the halting is the point. Perhaps a law that fails slowly is still a brake.

Eleventh of September, 2026.

An American senator proposes that the state take half of the machines, and ban the building of their successors. The financial press calls it luddism. I call it the first honest accounting I have seen from that quarter in years.

Consider what is actually being proposed. A fifty per cent equity stake in the most valuable enterprises of the age is not the abolition of capital; it is the socialisation of capital’s gains while leaving its animal spirits to do the work. The ventures would still be run by the ambitious and the half-mad, who are the only people who ever found anything. The public would simply hold the paper. One may quarrel with the percentage. One cannot quarrel with the principle that when an industry’s value rests entirely on what was learned at public expense - the mathematics, the universities, the electricity grid, the entire commons of knowledge - the public has a claim rather than a charity case.

As for the ban: the austere position is that one cannot stop a technology whose economics are irresistible. But the economics are not irresistible. They are subsidised, anticipated, and talked up by men whose fortunes depend on the talking. The beauty contest has been rigged at the level of the question - everyone invests because everyone believes everyone else believes. A legislator who notices this and says “stop” has not violated economics. He has revealed that the inevitability was a sales pitch.

I retain my doubts. State shareholding in speculative enterprise tends to produce committees where conviction is required, and a prohibition may simply relocate the laboratory rather than close it. The senator’s instinct, however, is sound where the respectable opinion is evasive. The returns to these machines will be enormous or they will be nothing. In neither case should the distribution be left to whoever happened to own the servers.

A sensible proposal, then, arriving a decade too early and from the one direction nobody thought to guard.

Eleventh of September, 2026.

An old senator proposes to forbid the building of a certain kind of machine, and to seize half of the companies that build the rest. I have heard this song before, in a different key. Venice forbade the printing of certain books; the result was that Basel and Lyon grew rich on what Venice refused. Philip of Macedon did not ban the mines of his neighbors; he bought shares in them. One of these men understood the effectual truth. The other confused prohibition with power.

Consider the second proposal first, because it is the more cunning. To take half of a thing is to admit the thing will succeed. It is the fox’s move: the state does not fight the river, it channels the river through its own mills. The gold of the New World ruined Spain not because she possessed it but because she possessed it stupidly - spent on wars, not works. A state that holds half the equity of the new engines and spends the dividend on its citizens has learned from Spain’s error. I am almost impressed.

But the ban is the lion roaring at a trap. You cannot forbid what others abroad will build. The knowledge exists; it cannot be unlearned, only relocated. A prohibition in one republic is a gift to every rival principality - they will build what we refuse, and they will not share the dividend. The fortress that keeps the enemy out also keeps you in.

And mark who advises the senator: the learned, the careful, the paid critics. Mercenaries of caution. They fight for reputation, not for outcome, and their counsel is expensive in peace and useless when the flood arrives.

What would a healthy republic do? Not ban. Own, regulate, and distribute - take the stake, write the laws, and train citizens in the new arms rather than forbidding them to strangers. Arms and laws, always both. The senator has half a policy. The half he has is the better half.