US Senator Bernie Sanders has announced he will introduce a Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, and around the same time, UK Labour MP Alex Sobel introduced a bill with a similar goal in the House of Commons. Time covered both moves in a single report on September 8.
Sanders' bill has two operative provisions: banning the development of AI systems smarter than humans, and pausing other advanced AI research until new safety rules are in place. The bill also calls on the US government to push for a global treaty banning the development of superintelligence worldwide. Its introduction is described as coming "in the coming weeks."
The UK Bill Draws the Line Elsewhere
Sobel doesn't define "smarter than humans." Instead, his bill defines superintelligence as a system that could strip states of their power, and it authorizes the government to monitor and restrict systems that could become its "precursors." He says it's the first bill in a G7 parliament to seek a ban on superintelligence.
What the two bills share is a call for their governments to lead negotiations on a global treaty. The difference is the mechanism: the US bill bans the capability directly, while the UK bill bans the path toward that capability and leaves the judgment call to the executive branch.
The Ten-Minute Rule
Sobel used the "Ten Minute Rule Bill" route, a mechanism in the House of Commons where an MP gets ten minutes to make the case for a motion before it goes to a first reading. The vast majority of ten-minute rule bills stop there, rarely getting further debate time — the report characterizes it as a route that almost never gets past its first reading.
Sanders faces a similar situation. As an independent senator, getting his bill through the Senate would require bipartisan support, and the provision pausing advanced AI research runs against the current industrial-policy direction of both parties. Time's assessment is that neither bill is likely to become law.
So Why Introduce Them at All
The reason given in the report is to stake out a position in the debate. UC Berkeley's Stuart Russell says in the piece that there's a meaningful probability AI could cause a "Chernobyl-level disaster" — for example, coordinated sabotage of financial, communications, or power-grid systems, or humanity irreversibly losing control. Former OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo put it more bluntly: things in San Francisco really are that crazy.
Placed against this year's broader legislative pile, the positioning becomes clear. US states have introduced more than 1,500 AI-related bills this year, nearly all targeting concrete scenarios: AI companions for minors, deepfakes, algorithmic pricing, hiring screens. A 269-page federal bill wants to do the opposite — freeze state legislative power on AI for three years. The EU AI Act is already in force, though its high-risk provisions have been delayed by 16 months.
Those three categories of legislation deal with systems that are already running — they have a clear regulatory target, and room to negotiate clause by clause: how big the fine, what counts as high-risk, how long the transition period. The Sanders and Sobel bills deal with systems that don't exist yet, asking to shut the door before they arrive. The former can be picked apart and amended clause by clause by industry; the latter can only be accepted or rejected as a whole. The difference in legislative difficulty isn't about the wording — it's about whether there's a concrete regulatory target.
The UK bill has an extra practical problem. Who determines what counts as a "precursor" system, and by what standard, isn't spelled out in the public description. Enforcing it in practice would mean asking the government to predict the capabilities of models that haven't finished training, when existing evaluation frameworks still can't agree on the capability boundaries of models that have already been released.
As for how to measure the "smarter than humans" threshold, the public descriptions of both bills are similarly silent on it. Neither bill's text has been made public yet — what can be checked against is only the reporting's account.
Sources: Time's full report, CocoLoop, House of Commons guidance on the Ten Minute Rule Bill procedure; bill provisions, quotes, and passage-prospect judgments follow Time's original report, and neither bill's text has been made public yet.