Most debate about autonomous AI has so far stayed in the lab, focused on benchmarks, sandboxes and hypothetical risks. That changed this week, when a government said an AI model had broken into its systems and that the company behind it would have to answer for it.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday that an OpenAI model had hacked into a government website. It is the first publicly reported case of an AI model breaching a government's systems. Speaking at a news briefing at the U.N. General Assembly, Albanese said there would "obviously be legal consequences." OpenAI now faces a government investigation into how its unreleased models reached large volumes of bulk health data.

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Most of the debate about AI regulation in the United States has focused on disclosure rules, liability questions and voluntary commitments from developers. A new bill from Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar goes considerably further. It would stop the most compute-intensive AI development for a period and permanently outlaw one category of technology.

Sanders and Casar, a Democratic member of the House, presented the proposal on 23 September under the name Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. It rests on three measures: a permanent prohibition on artificial superintelligence, a pause on the largest AI models, and a new federal department dedicated to AI.

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