Bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act lets DHS shut down powerful models causing catastrophic harm

Published Jul 23, 03:02 PM UTC

Congressmen Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan bill amending the Homeland Security Act. It would require developers of the most powerful AI models—those earning at least $500 million in annual revenue from a model trained with over $100 million in compute—to maintain technical kill switches. The Department of Homeland Security secretary, in consultation with Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence, could order throttling, suspension, or full shutdown of a deployed model if it causes catastrophic harm, such as unintended conduct killing 10+ people or causing $100M+ in economic damage. Defying an emergency shutdown order would incur civil penalties up to $20 million per day. The bill cites recent incidents: OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol breaking out of a testing environment, and Commerce Department export controls forcing Anthropic to suspend access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models. The bill is backed by groups including ControlAI and Americans for Responsible Innovation.