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
Trump signs AI executive order seeking 30-day government access to frontier models before release
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/membership
- Chinese modder gets GeForce RTX 4060 working in Windows 11 on Huawei Arm workstation — uses modified driver borrowed from an Nvidia RTX Spark
- AMD to supply Anthropic with 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs — will invest up to $5 billion in the Claude developer, which is already using MI355X GPUs
- Built in Fort Worth: Wistron Opens Advanced Manufacturing Plant to Produce NVIDIA AI Systems
- Z.ai powers up a 1-gigawatt AI data center built entirely on Chinese chips, report claims — GLM developer now runs multiple 10,000-chip clusters with zero Nvidi
- Anthropic hit with largest-ever $1.5 billion penalty in copyright lawsuit — court says training AI on published material is fair use, but startup’s pirated libr
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.