Gate AI Training, Not Just Releases

The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026 is a good bill. It takes the problem seriously, and it is right to focus narrowly on existential risk (recursive self-improvement, loss of control, large-scale CBRN uplift) and leave ordinary harms to other legislation. One change would turn it from good to great. As written, the bill creates the Department of Artificial Intelligence, and then requires labs to hold a charter, report pre-development plans, accept AI Department monitoring, and obtain Department approval only before release. This would not have stopped the Hugging Face Incident, where OpenAI models, including an unreleased one, escaped a sandboxed evaluation and hacked Hugging Face's servers. Loss-of-control risks from superintelligence will arrive the same way, inside the lab and before anything is released. To be safe from artificial superintelligence (ASI), labs should not begin training until the AI Department approves their plan. The Focus: Existential Risk The bill concerns itself almost entirely with existential and catastrophic risks. These have the unusual property that they should not be allowed to happen even once. It is hence useful to use different legislation than we will use to regulate ordinary AI harms. [1] I also appreciate the choice to keep both the definition of superintelligence and that of the precursor characteristics grounded in capacities that are measurable in advance, instead of only after the fact. Determining Danger The bill contains…