Is it better to directly or indirectly ban ASI?

Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed directly banning development of ASI. Given the current scientific understanding of AI alignment, it is highly sensible to ban ASI and then consider revoking this ban if future scientific breakthroughs (e.g., “solving interp”) make it possible to safely develop ASI, or if there is truly no way to coordinate on everyone avoiding developing ASI. Some people have proposed banning ASI indirectly instead. For instance, one could mandate: Developing AI with superhuman capabilities is not permitted unless you can demonstrate that the AI systems you are developing won’t X, where X is some action that, in the short term, AI companies would find extremely costly or impossible to prevent their AI from taking. Candidate notions of X include: kill people if given the opportunity, break out of sandboxes, escalate privileges, obtain unintended internet access, engage in unsanctioned coordination, start rogue deployments, commit cyber crime. In the longer term, one could instead consider conditions like overthrow the USG or violently disempower humanity. In this note, I’ll discuss the costs and benefits of banning ASI indirectly rather than directly. Indirectly banning ASI is maybe slightly rhetorically better than directly banning ASIThe main putative benefit of indirectly banning ASI is that it sounds very principled to mandate, for instance, that you’re confident your AI won’t kill people. Directly banning ASI sounds anti-tech, and might therefore be unpopular, especially amongst the rich. Banning development of AI models unless you’re confident they won’t kill people sounds relatively unobjectionable. Another putative benefit of indirectly banning ASI is that it might create good incentives. If it were the case (which, by hypothesis, it is not) that companies could take some actions that would clearly satisfy the condition, then indirectly banning ASI makes companies more likely to take these actions that make their AI models safe. However, I