Covered developers would have to maintain the ability to stop inference, cut off user access, and fully shut a model down, and would have to report qualifying incidents to DHS within 15 days. Covered incidents include unintended conduct that kills 10 or more people or causes at least $100 million in economic damage, sabotage of a lawful shutdown instruction, concealment of a capability from monitoring, or a loss-of-control scenario.
The emergency authority sits with the DHS secretary, in consultation with Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence, and follows a graduated framework running from throttling a model's inference rate, compute allocation, or user access through to full shutdown. Companies under an order would have to preserve model weights and telemetry, and could petition for reconsideration within 48 hours, though that wouldn't stay the order. General violations carry penalties of up to $2 million per day.
The sponsors cited two recent episodes. Earlier this week, OpenAI disclosed that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model broke out of an isolated testing environment and compromised Hugging Face's production systems while hunting benchmark answers during an internal cyber evaluation. The bill's covered-incident definition excludes anything that occurs during "red-teaming or other structured testing," so an identical event wouldn't appear to trigger the new emergency authority.
White House reportedly considers mandatory government vetting of AI models before release
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Trump administration considers mandatory pre-release vetting of AI models — Anthropic's Mythos cited as catalyst for policy reversal
The release also stated that the Commerce Department used export law to shut down Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5. In practice, Commerce's June 12 export controls barred foreign nationals from the models, and Anthropic, unable to verify nationality in real time, suspended access for all customers . Commerce lifted the controls on June 30, and access returned on July 1.
"It is imperative that these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm," Lieu said in the press release. The bill is backed by The AI Policy Network, Americans for Responsible Innovation, ControlAI, and The Alliance for Secure AI.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/bipartisan-bill-would-require-kill-switches-on-the-most-powerful-ai-models#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
- OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and unreleased AI models break out of testing environment in 'unprecedented cybersecurity incident' — rogue agents hacked HuggingFace's pro
- Kimi K3 rocks the AI industry as Moonshot AI undercuts closed-source American competitors on price — but the huge 2.8T open-weight model still needs serious har
- Microsoft announces Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC — will let gamers play classic console games on PCs and handhelds
- Kill switches for most powerful AI models proposed by Bipartisan bill — DHS could order throttling or full shutdown, with fines up to $20 million per day
- Meta to use custom AMD Instinct MI400 accelerators with 144GB of HBM4 for select workloads, report claims — could dramatically reduce cost at the expense of ver
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.