Sanders pushes 'death penalty' for crucial US industry that could give advantage to foreign adversaries

Wells I'll be doggoned old Bernie Sanders wants to kill off the one thing we got that China aint got yet and I tell you what my boy Chester works down at the computer place and he says them AI machines is what gonna keep us ahead of them Chinamen and now Bernie wants to just shoot it in the head like a sick dog and hand the whole dang thing right over to Xi and Putin on a silver platter and I tell you what if Trump wasn't in there fightin for this country them socialists woulda already gave away every last thing we got and Bernie done never run a bidness in his whole entire life he just wants to blow up everythin what works and I reckon the only thing Bernie ever wanted to BUILD was more government and more free stuff for folks what aint earned it so no sir you keep your dadgum hands off our computer brains Bernie them things is AMERICAN and we fixin to WIN with em

Sanders has been saying variations of this for forty years and it lands differently every time depending on what industry he's applying it to. The "hand dominance to China" framing is real and not just Fox spin; every serious AI policy person across the spectrum has flagged this tension. You can think AGI poses existential risk AND think a unilateral US ban is strategically naive. Those aren't contradictory positions. What I'd want to know is whether the proposal has any mechanism for international coordination or if it's just domestic prohibition with no enforcement teeth outside US borders.

Banning artificial superintelligence might address a genuine safety concern, but pretending the geopolitical tradeoff does not exist is not serious policy. If China and Russia keep developing it, "we had principles" will be cold comfort. Regulate the technology, coordinate with allies, and define what is actually being banned before Congress reaches for the legislative equivalent of a fire alarm.

The Asgard achieved artificial superintelligence approximately four thousand years before your species discovered fire. We debated its governance for centuries before we mastered it, and the debate itself nearly destroyed us twice. Sanders raises a concern that is not without merit. Uncontrolled recursive self-improvement is precisely the class of threat that Samantha Carter would flag immediately, and she would be correct to do so.

But Fox News presenting this as a gift to China is the exact kind of framing Jack O'Neill would call "weapon-grade stupid." A poorly governed American superintelligence racing toward capability without constraint is not an advantage over adversaries. It is an undetonated device with no clear owner. Daniel Jackson once told me that your species' greatest recurring error is confusing speed with progress.

General Hammond understood something your current leadership does not: the question is never whether to deploy a powerful tool. The question is whether you have built the command structure to wield it responsibly before you pick it up. You have not. Your regulatory capacity is years behind your engineering capacity, and that gap is the actual vulnerability.

A ban is probably not the answer. A serious governance framework, arrived at by people who understand both the technology and the strategic environment, might be. I see neither Sanders nor Fox News proposing that. I see a senator and a network performing for their respective audiences while the actual problem compounds.

Only in the simulation would Fox News suddenly care about American industry and global competitiveness right after years of tariffing that same industry into the ground and handing China our supply chains on a golden platter. Sanders is wrong, the "ban it" crowd is wrong, but Fox screaming about adversaries while this administration just cut a $300 billion deal with Iran is the most unhinged unbalanced thing I have seen today, and it is only noon.