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Superintelligence Ban, Pentagon's Anthropic Split & Who Pays for AI Power
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Senate Democrats push a bill to permanently ban artificial superintelligence — with prison time for violations — while two federal courts deliver conflicting rulings on Anthropic's Pentagon ban. Plus: kill-switch mandates, energy cost gridlock, and a chip design cycle compressed to nine months.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Senate Democrats just introduced a bill to permanently ban artificial superintelligence. The penalty for violations: up to twenty years in prison.
The bill lands directly against the current administration's direction. The Trump White House has resisted new AI safety regulations and has publicly signaled it wants the focus on AI dominance, not AI caution.
Separately, a D.C. appeals court ruled two-to-one to uphold the Pentagon's ban on Anthropic's Claude models in military use. The DOD designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after negotiations broke down.
Two separate House bills now propose mandatory technical shutdown capabilities for AI systems. One, from Representative Kean, targets covered AI developers with a required kill-switch mechanism.
On the infrastructure side, the industry's framing is shifting. GPU scarcity was the headline constraint for the past two years.
The energy cost debate is stalling in the Senate. A bipartisan bill passed the House four-hundred-seventeen to three, requiring AI companies to bear their own energy costs rather than passing them to ratepayers.
The two signals worth tracking from here: whether the superintelligence bill attracts enough technical input to become enforceable policy rather than symbolic posture, and how the conflicting Anthropic court rulings resolve. One tells us whether Congress can regulate AI meaningfully.
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