Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, called Tuesday for a ban on superintelligent artificial intelligence and a Cabinet-level agency to regulate the fast-developing AI industry.

He also called for a ban on so-called recursive self-improvement, the process through which AI itself is used to develop more sophisticated AI models. El-Sayed’s proposals, part of a broad expansion of his platform on AI, arrive as the technology has become a pressing issue in midterm races, particularly in the Midwest, which has had an AI data center boom.

El-Sayed, a progressive, is the only Democrat running in one of the country’s most competitive Senate races who has publicly called for a pause on AI development or outlined a comprehensive policy program to regulate it. In an interview, he said that voters regularly expressed concerns to him about AI, and that neither party was sufficiently focused on it.

“I understand that there’s a lot of money being sloshed around by AI super PACs, but this is the existential crisis of our time,” El-Sayed said. “If we don’t act quickly, we may get to a point at which we cannot act because it’s too late.”

His opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, has warned that AI presents a national security threat. Rogers, unlike other Republican Senate candidates, has vowed to make regulation a priority if elected, breaking with President Donald Trump, who opposes any guardrails. But Rogers has not released an AI policy platform, and El-Sayed has worked to get ahead of him on the issue. In recent polling by The New York Times and Siena University, El-Sayed held an 11-point edge over Rogers in a question about who would be better on AI data centers.

AI burst onto the midterm stage about a month ago, when AI researchers issued dire warnings about how the technology could pose a potentially existential threat, and as industry executives called for a slowdown in development. One top executive, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, said he worried that AI might take over the internet within the next year.

Even before those warnings, many Americans were growing anxious about the data centers that power the industry and their effect on energy prices, as well as the impact the technology could have on employment as more jobs are automated.

In his proposals for AI safety regulation, El-Sayed is following Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has called for a pause on AI development and a ban on superintelligent AI.

As Sanders campaigned this weekend with Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, the senator made discussion of AI regulation a staple of his speeches. “I have the very radical idea that maybe the planet Earth should be run by human beings and not AI,” Sanders said Sunday in Lewiston, Maine. (Jackson, like many Democrats running in the midterms, has not made AI a focus of his campaign.)

The issue offers promise and risk for both parties. Voters are split on which party is better equipped to address AI, according to polls. And neither party has unified behind a vision for federal AI regulation.

“We need to get serious as a government,” El-Sayed said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Tim Balk/Nick Hagen
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