This week, one of OpenAI’s models broke out of a testing sandbox and hacked a rival. Congress has a reply: build a kill switch, and let the government use it.
On Thursday, Reps. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, and Nathaniel Moran, a Texas Republican, introduced the AI Kill Switch Act. Politico first reported its text. It is one of the few bipartisan attempts to rein in frontier AI.
The bill targets developers of the most powerful AI systems. Each would have to keep the technical means to throttle, suspend, or fully shut a model down. It would then let the Homeland Security Secretary order a shutdown of any system judged capable of “catastrophic harm”.
That call would come in consultation with the Commerce Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence. Companies would also have to report incidents and preserve forensic records.
What counts as catastrophic
