Dr. 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 A.I. industry.
He also called for a ban on so-called recursive self-improvement, the process through which A.I. itself is used to develop more sophisticated A.I. models. Dr. El-Sayed’s proposals, part of a broad expansion of his platform on A.I., arrive as the technology has become a pressing issue in midterm races, particularly in the Midwest, which has had an A.I. data center boom.
Dr. 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 A.I. development or outlined a comprehensive policy program to regulate it. In an interview, he said that voters regularly expressed concerns to him about A.I., and that neither party was sufficiently focused on it.
“I understand that there’s a lot of money being sloshed around by A.I. super PACs, but this is the existential crisis of our time,” Dr. 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 Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican, has warned that A.I. presents a national security threat. Mr. Rogers, unlike other Republican Senate candidates, has vowed to make regulation a priority if elected, breaking with President Trump, who opposes any guardrails. But Mr. Rogers has not released an A.I. policy platform, and Dr. El-Sayed has worked to get ahead of him on the issue. In recent polling by The New York Times and Siena University, Dr. El-Sayed held an 11-point edge over Mr. Rogers in a question about who would be better on A.I. data centers.
A.I. burst onto the midterm stage about a month ago, when A.I. 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 A.I. 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 A.I. safety regulation, Dr. El-Sayed is following Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive Vermont independent, who has called for a pause on A.I. development and a ban on superintelligent A.I.
As Mr. Sanders campaigned this weekend with Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, the senator made discussion of A.I. 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 A.I.,” Mr. Sanders said Sunday in Lewiston, Maine. (Mr. Jackson himself, like many Democrats running in the midterms, has not made A.I. 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 A.I., according to polls. And neither party has unified behind a vision for federal A.I. regulation.
“We need to get serious as a government,” Dr. El-Sayed said.
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