Bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act lets DHS shut down powerful models, impose $20M daily fines

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 compute costing over $100 million—to maintain technical capabilities to throttle, suspend, or shut down their models. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could order such actions if a deployed model 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, with general violations up to $2 million per day. Covered developers must report qualifying incidents within 15 days and preserve model weights and telemetry. The bill cites recent incidents involving OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5. The DHS secretary would have emergency authority, in consultation with Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence, following a graduated framework from throttling to full shutdown. Companies could petition for reconsideration within 48 hours, but the order would remain in effect.