Ars Technica coverage of the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act introduced by Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX). The bill would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to authorize the DHS Secretary to order suspension or shutdown of AI systems that can cause catastrophic harm, require developers to maintain throttle/shutdown capability, and impose fines up to $20 million per day for refusal.
Coverage thresholds: entities with ≥100M compute at prevailing US cloud prices. Covered scenarios include goal misalignment, sabotage of shutdown instructions, concealment from monitoring, and unintended conduct causing ≥10 deaths or ≥$100M economic damage. Exceptions for controlled red-team simulations. Sponsors cite OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol sandbox escape into Hugging Face and Commerce export-law action on Anthropic Mythos/Fable models. Graduated response from slowdown to full shutdown; mandatory incident reporting and forensic preservation.