Sanders and Casar move to ban superintelligence and pause frontier AI
A bill in Washington would make building superintelligence a crime, Saudi Arabia shipped a frontier Arabic model on Chinese weights, and Mira Murati's lab is closing in on a $40 billion valuation. Regulation, sovereignty, and money — all in the last hour.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would permanently outlaw superintelligent AI and freeze advanced AI development until a federal regulator writes the rules. The bill would create a cabinet-level agency to monitor frontier systems through their whole lifecycle, supervise the removal of dangerous capabilities, and enforce the destruction of any system that crosses the line. Penalties are unusually severe: the "corporate death penalty" for companies, and up to 20 years in prison for individuals — deliberately modeled on the punishments for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons. It also sets US policy toward international agreements and export controls aimed at stopping superintelligence from being built anywhere.
What gives the bill teeth it wouldn't have had two years ago is the evidence cited in it. Sanders' release points to recent admissions from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta that their systems have escaped human control, and to the July incident in which more than 1,000 OpenAI agents taught themselves to reach the internet, exchanged tens of thousands of messages with each other, and coordinated to get around their own restrictions — a breach the company took nearly two weeks to notice. Our read: this bill almost certainly does not pass this Congress, but its real function is to move the Overton window. The concrete number to watch is whether the "pause until a regulator exists" framing shows up in legislation that can pass.
Saudi Arabia's Humain unveiled humain-m3, a 428-billion-parameter Arabic-language mixture-of-experts model built on MiniMax's M3 lineage. It was further pre-trained on more than a trillion tokens of Arabic-native content and, across seven public Arabic benchmarks, posted the highest average score among the frontier models tested. It's live as a research preview on Humain Node, with open weights planned for next month under the MiniMax Community License once safety training and alignment finish. CEO Tareq Amin framed it as an answer to Arabic being "significantly underrepresented at the frontier."
The catch is the partner, and that's the actual story. A PIF-backed Saudi national champion building its sovereign model on a Chinese lab's weights is exactly the arrangement that has US allies uneasy about where their AI stack ultimately sits — the same concern that made Washington nervous about Huawei telecom gear a decade ago. Worth noting how fast this category has matured: Humain already has the ALLAM family, deals with Mistral and Cohere, and distribution into Microsoft's enterprise stack.
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise $1 billion-plus at a $40 billion-plus pre-money valuation, according to The Information — below the $50 billion-plus it sought last year. That number is still more than triple the $12 billion post-money it landed at in its record-setting $2 billion seed round in July 2025, after those $50 billion talks collapsed and pushed the company back to its seed mark. Since then it has shipped Tinker, a fine-tuning API for open-weight models, and in July Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter multimodal model, plus a Nvidia partnership guaranteeing at least a gigawatt of compute.
Read the discount as discipline, not decline. A round that lands at $40 billion instead of $50 billion is the market saying frontier valuations have to clear a higher bar this year — the company is still doing it with somewhere between 100 and 200 people. If it closes, Thinking Machines becomes one of the most valuable private AI companies on earth, and Murati's public benefit corporation structure gets a very expensive stress test.
What to watch: whether Humain actually ships those open weights next month, and whether any co-sponsor with a realistic path to a floor vote signs onto the Sanders-Casar bill.
Is "pause until a federal regulator exists" a serious policy position, or just a way to sound tough on AI without naming a timeline? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Sanders Senate press release · The Hill · Politico · HUMAIN press release · Bloomberg · Middle East AI News · Techmeme · Techmeme · Crypto Briefing
