Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, is planning to introduce a bill requiring artificial intelligence (AI) developers to have a “kill switch” to turn off dangerous AI as concerns mount about the risks posed by the rapidly developing technology. Kennedy’s proposal comes as Congress faces growing calls to regulate the technology and the bill could present the Senate with one of its most immediate opportunities to implement what he calls a key safety measure. Concerns over AI have surged to the forefront after Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher for Anthropic and OpenAI, sounded the alarm last week, warning that the industry is not acting responsibly.
He said there will soon be “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” and that many in the industry believe AI could end humanity in a matter of years. His remarks opened the floodgates, with other AI researchers following with warnings that the technology could lead to catastrophic events, calling on legislators to act quickly to implement guardrails. Others, however, have argued that pacing AI could give China an advantage in the AI arms race.
Kennedy said he plans to introduce an AI kill switch to the Senate on Wednesday, Politico reported. It’s not clear whether the Senate will agree to unanimously advance the bill. If it does advance through the Senate, it would still need to pass the House and receive the signature of President Donald Trump, who has so far resisted calls for greater AI regulation.
Representatives Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, and Nathaniel Moran, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill in July that would require AI developers to “maintain the technical capability to throttle, suspend, or shut them down.” Their bill would also authorize a graduated response framework so that the government’s tools “match the severity of the incident, and require incident reporting,” according to a press release from Lieu’s office. Lieu said on CNN that other technologies have kill switches and that AI should not be exempt. They have the smartest people working at these frontier labs,” he said.
How similar Kennedy's bill is to the House bill was not clear. Newsweek reached out to Kennedy's office and the White House for comment via email. An AI kill switch is a mechanism designed to shut down or disable an artificial intelligence system if it behaves unexpectedly or becomes unsafe.
It could refer to a few different mechanisms, including a human-controlled emergency shutdown, as well as access or permission controls that could revoke an AI’s access to the internet. An AI kill switch “can be as easy as just unplugging something,” Erman Ayday, professor of computer and data science at Case Western Reserve University, told Newsweek on Tuesday. It can also be a software mechanism plugged into a model that “instantly suspends the systems’ operation” and access to servers, he said.
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