Bloomington, Indiana council member proposes a city ordinance banning superintelligent AI within city limits, with fines up to $2,500
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
Bloomington, Indiana council member Dave Rollo has proposed Ordinance 2026-29, which would add a “Prohibition of Superintelligence” chapter to the city code.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
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Key facts
- Sponsor: council member Dave Rollo; his third AI-risk measure in about three years (a 2023 AGI-moratorium resolution was withdrawn for lack of votes after Indiana University raised research-funding concerns; a resolution urging a federal AGI moratorium passed unanimously on June 10, 2026)
- Form: an ordinance, not a resolution, so it carries penalties. It would add Chapter 14.25, ‘Prohibition of Superintelligence’, to Title 14 (peace and safety) of the city code; the linked file names it Ord. 2026-29
- Core text: ‘No person or corporation shall distribute or permit to be distributed nor deployed’ superintelligence; ‘deployment’ covers use through a locally accessed interface, browser, API or connected hardware in the city, wherever the servers are
- Definition: ‘Any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest’; indicators include systems that modify their own algorithms, run code outside restricted environments or operate without continuous human oversight. No test, certifying body or standard of proof is set
- Enforcement: civil penalties and court orders through the city’s legal and police departments, fines up to $2,500 under the general penalty provision, daily penalties for continuing violations; enforcement is discretionary
- Lifting the ban needs both a council finding of scientific consensus that superintelligence can be controlled with 99.9999% safety certainty and approval by more than 95% of registered voters; it also sunsets 91 days after any state law creating a framework for ‘Provably Safe Superintelligence’
- Rollo’s memo calls it an ‘interim safety perimeter’ and hopes about 350 cities adopt similar ordinances, creating a ‘massive regulatory burden’ for developers; it names the SAFE AI Forever Institute as a possible promoter
- Questions raised by the B Square Bulletin (Dave Askins): whether a city can regulate technology supplied from outside its borders (interstate commerce), how Indiana’s Home Rule Act and IC 36-1-3-8 apply to the voter-approval mechanism, how violations would be detected, and why a later council could not simply repeal it by majority vote
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- Schedule: introduction at the Oct 14, 2026 council meeting (no vote); final action possible on Nov 4, 2026
What happened
Bloomington is the home of Indiana University. Council member Dave Rollo has pushed AI-risk measures there since 2023. His new proposal goes further than the earlier non-binding resolutions: it would make it a city offence to distribute or deploy a superintelligent system in Bloomington, and it counts remote use through a browser or API as deployment.
The local news site B Square Bulletin published a detailed analysis on Oct 11. It notes that the text does not say how anyone would establish that a system is “superintelligent”, and that the conditions for lifting the ban (a 99.9999% safety finding plus approval by 95% of all registered voters) are close to impossible to meet, while an ordinary repeal would need only five of nine council votes.
Why it matters
It is the first proposal we know of for a binding municipal ban on superintelligence in the US. It has not been introduced or voted on yet, and its legal footing is doubtful. It shows that the “ban superintelligence” position, already present in Congress (Sanders and Casar) and the UK Parliament (Sobel), has reached city councils.
Note: based on one local source. We did not read the ordinance text or Rollo’s memo directly.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 press
Press
Changes
- Filed (B Square Bulletin read directly)