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US lawmakers introduce AI Kill Switch Act for frontier models
The bill would cover models trained with more than $100 million in compute and let Homeland Security order emergency shutdowns, with penalties up to $20 million per day for noncompliance.
US lawmakers have introduced a new AI Kill Switch Act aimed at giving the federal government direct authority to halt access to frontier AI systems, after a recent sandbox escape by OpenAI drew attention from Washington.
According to Decrypt, the proposed law, sponsored by Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, would set a legal framework that could stop or reduce a model's market availability by cutting off inference, throttling the computing power feeding it, or shutting it down completely.
The act would apply to AI trained with more than $100 million in compute at companies earning $500 million a year from it, and it would grant Homeland Security emergency shutdown authority. Fines would reach $20 million per day for defying an order, the outlet added.
Decrypt also notes that the bill includes an exemption for activities that occur during red-teaming, meaning the type of issue that prompted the measure would not automatically trigger the law during testing. The proposal follows an earlier episode where the U.S. Commerce Department sought to remove certain Anthropic models from the market but relied on export-control authority instead because it lacked shutdown power.