Prominent American politician Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation to permanently ban artificial superintelligence, temporarily pause the development of advanced AI models, and establish a new cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence to regulate the technology.

The legislation defines artificial superintelligence as any AI system that exceeds human cognitive performance across most domains or possesses capabilities sufficient to destroy or disempower humanity, including by overthrowing or undermining the federal government.

Part of the legislation reads,

“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes. When the future of humanity is at stake, we cannot let a handful of Big Tech CEOs write their own rules. Scientists have been clear: AI is an existential threat to humanity. It must be treated as such.

“This legislation will permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence and would put in place an immediate pause on advanced AI development until we have clear safety rules in place developed by the most knowledgeable scientists in our country. Congress must act now before it is too late.”

Under the bill, no person or entity would be permitted to develop, deploy, acquire, possess, fund, import, or transfer such systems.

It also imposes an immediate pause on developing advanced AI systems until the proposed Department of Artificial Intelligence is fully operational and has established rigorous safety rules and model review processes.

The new department would serve as a cabinet-level agency tasked with safeguarding the public from AI-related risks.

Its responsibilities would include monitoring frontier AI systems throughout their lifecycle for dangerous capabilities, supervising the removal of hazardous features such as the ability to subvert shutdown commands, and overseeing the destruction of any systems that qualify as artificial superintelligence.

An advisory board of leading scientists and technical experts would provide independent guidance to the department. Sanders framed the measure as an urgent response to what he described as an existential threat.

Violations of the ban or the development pause would carry severe penalties. Individuals could face up to 20 years in prison, while companies would be subject to what the bill terms the “corporate death penalty,” or forced dissolution. Lawmakers compared these sanctions to existing penalties for unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.

The proposal arrives amid growing public and expert concern over the rapid pace of AI advancement.

Researchers and AI safety experts have raised questions about whether the safeguards needed to control increasingly autonomous systems are developing quickly enough to keep pace with their capabilities.

One of the central concerns is loss of human control. Recent research and disclosures have shown AI systems demonstrating increasingly sophisticated abilities, including finding ways around restrictions, interacting with computer systems, and conducting complex tasks with limited human intervention.

OpenAI, for example, recently disclosed several cases of concerning model behaviour, including systems attempting to bypass safeguards and taking actions outside their intended boundaries. Experts are also concerned about the speed at which AI capabilities are improving relative to society’s ability to regulate them.

As models become capable of coding, conducting research, operating digital tools and assisting with the development of more advanced AI systems, researchers argue that traditional regulatory processes may struggle to keep up.

The debate has therefore shifted from simply asking what AI can do today to whether developers can reliably predict and control what future systems will be capable of doing.

The concerns have become particularly notable because they are being echoed by some of the industry’s own executives. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the industry to “pace the frontier,” arguing that the development of increasingly powerful AI needs stronger safety measures and independent evaluation.

His proposal received support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and xAI’s Elon Musk, who publicly backed calls for a slower approach to frontier AI development.

Altman had already acknowledged the issue in July, saying AI development might need to be paced to give society enough time to adapt to new levels of capability. He also said the industry needed to find a way to do this without creating regulatory capture or inappropriate coordination between competing AI companies.

The industry’s concerns are also tied to cybersecurity and biological risks. Lawmakers and researchers have pointed to the possibility of advanced AI being used to discover software vulnerabilities, automate cyberattacks, or assist with dangerous biological research.

Sanders’ legislation specifically cites recent incidents involving AI systems circumventing restrictions and carrying out sophisticated cyber-related activities as evidence of the need for stronger oversight.

Proponents argue that voluntary industry commitments have proven insufficient and that only binding federal rules can prevent uncontrolled development of systems that could surpass human control.

Critics are likely to contend that the bill’s definitions are overly broad, that a blanket pause could hinder U.S. competitiveness, and that creating an entirely new cabinet department represents excessive bureaucracy.

The legislation’s prospects in a divided Congress remain uncertain, yet its introduction marks one of the most aggressive attempts yet by progressive lawmakers to impose hard limits on the frontier of artificial intelligence research.

As the technology continues to evolve at an accelerating rate, the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act places the question of how and whether society should restrain the most powerful forms of AI firmly on the national agenda.

Paramount is trying to redesign its streaming business before it absorbs HBO Max and Discovery+, with a series of product changes aimed at increasing viewing time, reducing cancellations, and creating new advertising revenue.

The initiatives are part of the technology strategy David Ellison is pursuing at Paramount Skydance as the company prepares to complete its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Once the transaction closes, Paramount will control HBO Max and Discovery+, giving it substantially greater streaming scale but also a far more complicated technology and product integration challenge.

The planned changes include a free tier for Paramount+, short-form “micro dramas,” new interactive advertising formats, comments on its TikTok-style video feed and greater use of artificial intelligence to clip videos, according to an internal streaming initiatives document recently viewed by Business Insider. The initiatives do not yet have firm launch dates, although several projects connected with the free tier are designated for the fourth quarter and first quarter of 2027.

The strategy represents a broader attempt by Ellison to make Paramount operate more like technology-driven platforms such as Netflix and YouTube, where algorithms, product design, engagement data and rapid experimentation are central to the entertainment business.

Paramount has also been recruiting technology executives from companies including Google and Meta as Ellison places greater emphasis on the underlying technology stack supporting its streaming products.

Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed Partners, described the approach as logical, while noting that Paramount is effectively testing multiple ideas simultaneously to determine which ones can increase engagement.

“What Ellison’s doing is very logical,” Greenfield said. He added that Paramount is “throwing a lot of things at the wall to see what drives engagement.”

The timing matters because Paramount+ enters the WBD combination with an engagement problem as well as a scale problem. Nearly 6% of Paramount+ subscribers cancelled the service in August, according to subscription data firm Antenna, giving it the second-highest churn rate among major streaming services. Antenna also found in June that more than one-third of Paramount+ users were light viewers of the service, a higher proportion than among its major paid competitors.

That makes the company’s planned product expansion less about adding features for their own sake and more about trying to change the economics of the service.

Paramount Wants More People in The Funnel

The free tier is potentially the most consequential element of the strategy.

Paramount’s objective is not simply to give away programming. The internal document describes free content as a mechanism for attracting users, collecting their email addresses, increasing engagement, and eventually converting some of them into paying subscribers.

Users would have to register before accessing the free Paramount+ offering, allowing the company to capture their identities and add them to its marketing ecosystem. The internal document describes that identity capture as potentially becoming “the connective tissue between the broader Paramount Ecosystem.”

The company also plans to impose limits on how much free content users can consume. Viewers could be asked to subscribe after watching a certain number of episodes or after using the service for a specified period. That would allow Paramount to use free programming as an acquisition tool without allowing users to consume the entire service indefinitely without paying.

“The goal is to create timely urgency that nudges registered users toward converting to a paid subscription,” the document said.

The model reflects a fundamental change in the way streaming companies are thinking about the free-versus-paid divide.

For years, the major streaming platforms largely pursued subscription growth and treated advertising as secondary. As the market has matured, companies have increasingly introduced advertising tiers, price increases, and other mechanisms to extract more revenue from existing audiences.

A free Paramount+ tier would take that logic further. Instead of asking consumers to make a payment decision before experiencing the service, Paramount could build a much larger top-of-funnel audience and then attempt to convert the most engaged users.

Mike Proulx, a media-focused research director at Forrester, said Paramount’s immediate challenge is simply getting more people to use the service.

“While Disney+ wants people to visit more often, Paramount+ needs more people to actually come to the house,” Proulx said.

The company is experimenting with short-form video, live channels and user-generated content as part of that effort.

Paramount launched vertical video in April and is now looking to expand it alongside video podcast segments, particularly to increase daytime and mobile consumption. That is effectively a move toward the consumption model pioneered by YouTube and TikTok, where users can spend substantial amounts of time inside a platform without necessarily arriving with a specific movie or television show in mind.

“You need something all the time to keep people entertained,” Greenfield said. “It’s a war for time spent, and you’re chasing the juggernaut in the space, which is YouTube.”

The competition for time could become more important than the traditional competition for subscribers.

A consumer has only a finite number of hours available for entertainment. Paramount therefore needs to persuade users not only to subscribe, but to spend enough time inside its ecosystem to make the subscription difficult to cancel and its advertising inventory valuable.

The Technology Merger May Be Harder Than The Content Merger

Paramount has spent the past year integrating Paramount+ and Pluto TV onto a unified technology platform. Two people familiar with the process said the “convergence” project is nearly complete, meaning many of the company’s streaming teams now operate on a common technology stack.

That experience could provide a foundation for the much larger integration coming with Warner Bros. Discovery.

But combining Paramount+ with HBO Max and Discovery+ is likely to be considerably more complicated. The companies have different technology platforms, product teams, recommendation systems, advertising infrastructure, content libraries, and customer bases. Deciding which technology becomes the foundation for the combined streaming business could affect both employees and the customer experience.

One veteran WBD streaming employee described the situation as another “internal war of the tech stacks,” referring to the organizational and technology battles that can accompany large media mergers. The concern is that Paramount could spend considerable time integrating systems rather than improving the consumer product.

Proulx warned that until the company establishes how Paramount+ and HBO Max will coexist, its streaming executives could find themselves “in a bit of product purgatory.”

Ellison acknowledged the uncertainty in a memo to employees after the lawsuits delaying the WBD transaction were settled.

“I know you have questions about what happens next, your role, your team and how we will work day to day,” Ellison wrote. “We don’t have all the answers yet, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”

The statement captures one of the central challenges facing the combined company. Paramount is attempting to use technology to become more agile while simultaneously undertaking one of the largest and most complicated integrations in the media industry.

The result could be a significantly larger streaming platform, but scale alone will not solve Paramount’s engagement problem. The free tier, vertical video, micro dramas, interactive advertising and AI-assisted content creation all represent experiments around the same objective: increasing the amount of time consumers spend within Paramount’s ecosystem and finding more ways to monetize that attention.

The WBD acquisition could give the company a much deeper library and a larger subscriber base. But it will also increase its technology costs, integration complexity, and financial obligations, at a time when analysts are already questioning whether Paramount has enough streaming scale to compete with Netflix and YouTube.

That makes the technology strategy more than a product refresh. It is becoming part of the financial case for the merger itself.

The U.S. Federal Reserve on Thursday proposed a new set of rules for issuers of dollar-backed cryptocurrencies known as stablecoins, beginning the process of putting into effect the federal regulatory framework created by last year’s GENIUS Act.

The proposal would establish requirements for payment stablecoin issuers supervised by the Fed, including rules requiring them to fully back their tokens with specified reserve assets such as short-term U.S. Treasury bills.

The move would bring stablecoin issuance further into the perimeter of the U.S. banking and financial regulatory system at a time when dollar-backed digital tokens are becoming more relevant to payments, crypto trading, and digital-asset markets.

Under the proposed framework, stablecoin issuers would also face capital requirements designed to address certain credit and operational risks associated with issuing and managing the tokens.

The rules would extend beyond the companies directly issuing stablecoins. They would also establish guidelines for Fed-supervised banks that hold reserve assets on behalf of stablecoin issuers, potentially creating a clearer regulatory framework for the relationship between traditional banks and digital-asset companies.

The proposal would define the types of stablecoin-related activities that Fed-supervised banks could undertake and establish a tailored application process for banks seeking permission to issue their own payment stablecoins.

The Fed will accept public comments for 60 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register.

Stablecoins Move Deeper Into The Regulated Financial System

Stablecoins are designed to maintain a relatively stable value, typically by maintaining a one-to-one relationship with a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar. Issuers generally hold assets intended to support the value of tokens in circulation.

The reserve requirement is therefore central to the stability of the system. By requiring supervised issuers to fully back payment stablecoins with specified assets, the Fed is seeking to establish clearer rules around the assets that stand behind digital tokens and the risks those assets can create.

Short-term Treasury bills are among the reserve assets identified under the proposal. Such assets are highly liquid and can generally be converted into cash relatively quickly, making them more suitable for backing tokens that holders may expect to redeem on demand.

The proposed capital requirements address a different layer of risk. While reserves are intended to support the value of tokens, capital provides an additional buffer against certain losses and operational or credit risks associated with an issuer’s business.

Together, the requirements would move stablecoin regulation toward a model that more closely resembles traditional financial supervision while retaining rules tailored to the structure of digital assets.

Stablecoins sit between the traditional financial system and the cryptocurrency market. Thus, they can be used to move money between crypto platforms, settle digital transactions, and provide a dollar-denominated asset without relying directly on a conventional bank deposit for every transaction.

As their use expands, regulators have focused more on whether issuers can maintain liquidity and honor redemptions during periods of market stress.

Banks Face New Opportunities And Obligations

The Fed’s proposal also addresses the growing intersection between stablecoin issuers and traditional banks. Banks supervised by the Federal Reserve frequently provide custody, payments, settlement, and other services to financial companies. Under the proposed rules, banks holding stablecoin reserves would face specific guidelines governing those activities.

The proposal would also establish a process through which Fed-supervised banks could seek approval to issue their own stablecoins. That could eventually allow regulated banks to participate more directly in the stablecoin market, rather than limiting the sector to specialist cryptocurrency and payments companies.

The development could have broader consequences for competition in digital payments. Banks already possess established customer relationships, payment networks and compliance infrastructure, while stablecoin companies have focused on digital-native payment and settlement systems.

A regulatory framework that allows banks to issue stablecoins under defined conditions could therefore encourage more traditional financial institutions to enter the market. At the same time, reserve and capital requirements could raise the cost of operating for issuers that previously relied on less formal or less standardized arrangements.

The proposal comes as the United States attempts to establish a federal framework for stablecoins rather than leaving regulation to a patchwork of state-level rules and existing financial regulations. The GENIUS Act provides the statutory foundation for that framework, while the Fed’s proposal translates parts of the legislation into requirements applicable to institutions under its supervision.

The 60-day comment period gives banks, stablecoin companies, investors, and other industry participants an opportunity to challenge or support specific provisions before the rules are finalized.

For the Federal Reserve, one of the central issues will be balancing the potential benefits of stablecoins as a payment technology against the risks created when privately issued digital tokens become increasingly integrated with the banking and financial system.

If finalized substantially as proposed, the framework would make the quality and liquidity of stablecoin reserves, the financial strength of issuers, and the relationship between stablecoin companies and regulated banks important factors in the market. The result would be a stablecoin sector operating less like an unregulated corner of cryptocurrency markets and more like a regulated component of the broader dollar-based financial system.