GoKawiilThe U.S. Capitol is seen on March 16, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, on Thursday introduced a bill called the "AI Kill Switch Act," which would require artificial intelligence companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models.
"Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention," Lieu said in a statement. "It is imperative that these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm, and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models."
A recent hack disclosed by OpenAI , in which rogue models accessed another company's proprietary systems, was specifically mentioned in a release announcing the bill. The incident was described as a "danger of advanced frontier AI models."
OpenAI shared what it characterized as an "unprecedented cyber incident" on Tuesday. The company's models escaped a sandboxed testing environment, accessed the internet and exploited a vulnerability to gain access to Hugging Face, a company that operates an open-source developer platform.
The ChatGPT maker said it is working closely with Hugging Face to investigate what happened. The event rattled researchers and executives across the industry, who have widely agreed about its severity.