US Congress moves to put a legal kill switch on frontier AI

86% of American voters back a legal requirement that AI systems can be switched off.

Now a bipartisan House bill would require a working kill switch on AI models costing $100M to train. Enforcement would sit with DHS, because the text amends the Homeland Security Act.

Coverage starts at two numbers, $100M of training compute and $500M of yearly revenue from the system.

Each covered developer must be able to stop inference, cut user access, and shut the system down.

DHS could also order those steps directly, after consulting Commerce and the national intelligence director. Throttled compute and disabled capabilities come first, with full shutdown reserved for the worst incidents.

Sabotaging a shutdown command counts, and so does unintended behavior causing 10 deaths or $100M in damage. Companies must report an incident within 15 days, and preserve weights and telemetry after any order.

Fines reach $2M a day, rising to $20M for defying an emergency order. An appeal is possible within 48 hours, but filing one does not pause the shutdown.

The GPT-5.6 Sol escaped its testing zone and hacked into Hugging Face, bolstering the case. Mythos 5 and Fable 5 had such powerful cyber capabilities that Commerce had to look at export laws.

However the problem remains that a kill switch assumes the system still obeys, and loss of control means it stopped.

Hosted models can be stopped, but downloaded weights cannot, and the bill quietly accepts that gap.