SILICON VALLEY, CALIF., (OCTOBER 14, 2026) — The consensus is that superintelligent AI could wipe out humanity. The proposed defenses keep piling up: kill switches, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s “emergency brake,” safety standards shared among democracies, and math-based methods like formal verification and “provably safe” design.
One local government is trying a different approach: just ban it.
Council member Dave Rollo of Bloomington, Indiana, will introduce an ordinance today that would ban superintelligent AI from being distributed or deployed anywhere in the city.
If the Common Council approves, the law could go into effect as early as Nov. 4.
The proposed ordinance says, in part, “No person or corporation shall distribute or permit to be distributed nor deployed into the premises of any citizen or business in our City, any Superintelligence for any purpose.”
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The ordinance doesn’t use “SI,” short for “Super Intelligence,” which is the term President Donald Trump has told federal agencies to use instead of “AI.” His introduction of this term, and its acceptance by some tech CEOs, obviously confuses matters, and forces newsletter writers to clarify what we’re actually talking about. What we’re talking about is superintelligent AI, which doesn’t exist yet.
The ordinance defines superintelligence as an AGI with superhuman agency, generality, and intelligence, including systems that can change their own core algorithms, run code outside their initial sandbox, or operate without continuous human oversight. It borrows the phrase “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”
It would even ban running superintelligent AI in a browser on hardware inside the city limits. Violators could be hit with a fine of up to $2,500 a day.
