AI Kill Switch Act would let Trump admin order shutdown of rogue AI systems

Trump would get more power over AI systems

The bill could face pushback over the power it would give government officials over AI companies. Anthropic has fought the Trump administration this year over a presidential order directing all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology.

“President Trump will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardize our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates,” the White House said in March.

Anthropic sued the US, alleging that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blacklisted the company because it refused to let Claude AI models be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans. A panel of Trump-appointed appeals court judges refused to block the blacklisting, but the case is ongoing.

We contacted OpenAI and Anthropic about the AI Kill Switch Act today and will update this article if they provide any comment.

“Powerful AI systems can go rogue”

Lieu, touting his experience as a computer science major, said that “powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention. It is imperative that these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm, and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models.”

The bill would apply to entities that earn at least $500 million in annual revenue from AI technology, and AI systems that use at least $100 million worth of computing power when calculated by “the prevailing market price of cloud computing in the United States.” The bill text describes several types of scenarios in which the proposed law could be invoked, but has exceptions for “red-team” tests in controlled environments that merely simulate real-world conditions.