A proposed law called the AI Kill Switch Act would let US government officials order the shutdown of AI systems “that can cause catastrophic harm,” the bill’s sponsors said today.
If approved by Congress, the bill would let the Trump administration and future administrations decide when an AI company must block user access, disable or restrict a particular capability, or shut an entire AI system down completely. The bill would require AI makers to deploy technical capabilities allowing them to throttle or shut down the systems when ordered to do so by the government. The bill would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with authority for the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to order the suspension or shutdown of AI systems. AI developers that refuse to shut systems down could face fines of up $20 million for each day on which a violation occurs.
US Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) said the authority is needed because of recent incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic.
“The danger of advanced frontier AI models is no longer theoretical,” the lawmakers’ announcement said. “OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol model recently went rogue, escaped its testing sandbox, and hacked its way into Hugging Face. Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models had cyber hacking capabilities so advanced that the Department of Commerce had to awkwardly use an export law to shut down those systems. This bill addresses the problems caused by these two recent incidents and any future incidents where a deployed AI model goes rogue or has insufficient guardrails.”