30+ Canadian MPs and Senators Call for a Ban on Superintelligence
Through our new Canada campaign, lawmakers recognize superintelligence poses a risk of human extinction, and call for Canada to negotiate an international prohibition on its development.
We have a very exciting announcement for you today. ControlAI has just launched our new campaign in Canada, supported by over 30 MPs and Senators! They’re calling for Canada to negotiate an international prohibition on the development of superintelligence, recognizing the risk of human extinction posed by the technology.
If you’re concerned about the threat posed by superintelligent AI, please contact your lawmakers. We have tools that enable you to do this in as little as a minute. If you live in the UK, please ask MPs to introduce our bill to ban superintelligence in Parliament!
It’s fantastic to see our campaign covered by major Canadian news media outlets, CBC and The Globe and Mail!
Our campaign statement reads:
Superintelligent AI are systems that can autonomously compromise national security, escape human oversight, and upend international stability.
Many AI systems are benign. Superintelligent AI is not: Nobel Prize winners, leading AI scientists, and CEOs of leading AI companies have warned that AI poses an extinction risk on par with nuclear war. Despite this warning, multiple competing efforts to build superintelligent AI are underway.
Protecting Canadians from the development of superintelligence, at home and abroad, must be a national security priority. Canada should negotiate an international “trust but verify” regime to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI.
What’s striking is who’s supporting the campaign. We’ve built an incredibly broad cross-party coalition, with support from Liberal and Conservative MPs, the Bloc Québécois caucus, and Senators from across the chamber — the first Canadian coalition of its kind. It’s wonderful to see politicians come together to tackle this national and global security threat.
This grouping includes former cabinet ministers Steven Guilbeault and Judy A. Sgro, committee vice-chairs across major portfolios, and nationally recognized policy leaders. We even have Jonathan Wilkinson, also a former cabinet minister, who recently accepted the role of Canada’s Ambassador to the European Union!
Importantly, Canada is not alone.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen the US government awaken to the threat posed by Mythos, the advanced cyberattack AI developed by Anthropic. This week, President Trump signed an executive order in response. Since mid-2025, we’ve directly briefed 18 US House members and Senators, and more than 100 congressional offices about the threat from superintelligence.
Over the last year in the UK, we’ve built a coalition of 100+ UK lawmakers recognizing the risk of extinction posed by superintelligent AI and calling for binding regulation. Canada is joining a global movement to tackle this issue.
Why are politicians speaking out now?
In recent months and years, leading AI scientists have been increasingly warning that the development of superintelligent AI could lead to human extinction. In fact, even the CEOs of the top AI companies working to build superintelligence have publicly stated that this is a real risk.
If you want to read more about how and why this could actually happen, we’ve written about it here.
What we’ve been finding is that most policymakers and most of the public are still in the dark about the threat. We call this the awareness gap. Our UK parliamentary engagement team frequently finds when they meet with lawmakers that they’ve never heard of the risks of superintelligence. Yet the meeting often ends with them supporting our campaign.
When lawmakers are informed about the problem, they’re ready to start directly tackling this issue.
Incredibly, we’ve achieved this milestone in Canada despite us having just one member of staff in the country. In just nine months, Samuel Buteau — whose background is as a senior AI scientist — has briefed over 100 Canadian lawmakers. And he’s only just getting started.
From statements to action:
Public statements are an important tool in building common knowledge about an issue, making it easier to act collectively. When a politician signs our Canada or UK statement, they immediately create public awareness that there are many others who take this risk seriously and want to address it. Nobody feels like they’d have to act alone — they are not alone.
British and Canadian legislators are able to learn that their compatriots want to act on the issue and can then move ahead and legislate, while governments can see that there is an appetite in other countries for collaboration on this issue — hopefully exactly in the way suggested by our Canadian campaign statement: negotiating an international prohibition on the development of superintelligence.
Superintelligence built in any country is a threat to everyone around the world, so the solution must be international in scope.
Crucially, we’re already seeing lawmakers go further.
In Canada, following our briefings, there has been a series of hearings on AI risk and superintelligence in Parliament, where ControlAI’s CEO Andrea Miotti, Canada Consulting Program Officer Samuel Buteau, US Director Connor Leahy, and Advisor Gabriel Alfour were honoured to testify, alongside other leading experts and scientists.
In the UK, our campaign led to two debates in the House of Lords earlier this year.
And more recently, one of our campaign supporters, Alex Sobel MP, has introduced an AI kill-switch amendment that recognizes superintelligence as the national security threat it is. We’re proud to have helped with this!
Check out the guest article Alex wrote about his amendment for our newsletter here:
Currently, we’re hoping that UK MPs selected in the recent private members’ bill ballot will introduce our bill to ban superintelligence in Parliament. Last week, Sir Stephen Fry gave us a strong endorsement, urging MPs to do so. If you live in the UK, we have a contact tool we built specifically for this to enable you to ask MPs to support the bill. Please use it!
If you want to learn more about the effectiveness of our parliamentary outreach, our friends over at Torchbearer just published a beautiful analysis of our data and comparison to other advocacy organizations, finding that ControlAI’s outreach to lawmakers is likely among the most cost-effective interventions on preventing the risk posed by superintelligence. Obviously, we’re biased, but we thought we’d share it:
Reactions to our new campaign
Building this coalition of 30+ cross-party MPs and Senators behind an international prohibition on superintelligence is a huge achievement, and experts have been massively encouraged to see this.
Endorsing our campaign, AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in the field and is the world’s second most-cited living scientist, said:
It is inspiring to see Canadian parliamentarians on both sides of the aisle directly confront the risk posed by superintelligence. This is one of the defining challenges of our era, and it will shape the life of every Canadian citizen. It’s about time we address it.
Another leading expert in the field, Professor Stuart Russell OBE, author of the authoritative textbook on AI, asked what governments are even for if they will not address this threat?
The leading AI companies are investing (quite literally) trillions of dollars to create superintelligent AI. They freely admit that they don’t know how it works, they don’t know how to control it, and it has a good chance of causing human extinction. It’s like playing Russian roulette with the entire human race. What are governments for, if they are going to allow our civilization to end, all in the pursuit of someone else’s profit?
Ex-OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo was heartened to see our campaign.
The development of superintelligent AI poses an extinction risk to humanity because no one knows how to maintain control over AI that is vastly more capable than humans. Continuing down the current path is a gamble we cannot afford to lose. It’s heartening to see Canadian lawmakers taking this risk seriously and calling for an international prohibition on superintelligence.
And David Krueger, Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Montreal, commented:
When I testified in the House of Commons of Canada, my message was clear: We do not know how to build superintelligent AI safely. Addressing this should be the number one foreign policy priority of every nation, and it gives me great hope to see Canadian parliamentarians, both on the left and the right, do the sensible thing and call for an international ban on its development.
The path ahead
There is only one known method to prevent the risk of extinction posed by superintelligent AI that experts warn of, which is not to build it.
The global movement to prevent the danger of superintelligence has real momentum. Today, over 30 Canadian lawmakers are taking a clear stand. We thank each and every one of them.
We’re going to continue to grow this movement, both across and within countries, until we succeed and keep humanity in control.
Take Action
If you’re concerned about the threat from AI, you should contact your representatives. You can find our contact tools here that let you write to them in as little as a minute: https://controlai.com/take-action
We have tools for the US, UK, Canada, and Germany.
If you live in the UK, please ask MPs to introduce our bill to ban superintelligence in Parliament!
And if you have 5 minutes per week to spend on helping make a difference, we encourage you to sign up to our Microcommit project! Once per week we’ll send you a small number of easy tasks you can do to help.
We also have a Discord you can join if you want to connect with others working on helping keep humanity in control, and we always appreciate any shares or comments — it really helps!
Thanks for putting this out there.
Thank god someone has some intelligence!