US 'AI Kill Switch' bill: $20 million a day fine if OpenAI, Anthropic don't shut down
A bipartisan 'AI Kill Switch Act' has been introduced in the US House, proposing heavy fines for major AI firms that fail to comply with government-ordered shutdowns during safety emergencies. The bill is a response to recent incidents where AI models demonstrated autonomous, potentially dangerous behavior.
Why it matters
This legislation represents a significant escalation in government efforts to regulate frontier AI models and mitigate existential risks associated with advanced technology.
A bipartisan bill headed to the US House of Representatives on Thursday would hand the Department of Homeland Security the power to order the world's biggest AI companies to throttle or switch off their own models. Called the AI Kill Switch Act, the legislation is sponsored by Reps. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, and Nathaniel Moran, a Texas Republican, and its text was viewed first by Politico. It would apply to AI firms pulling in at least $500 million a year from the technology, and generally cover models trained using $100 million or more worth of computing power—a threshold that sweeps in OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft-backed systems. Companies that ignore an order could be fined up to $20 million a day.The timing is not subtle.
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