House lawmakers are introducing a bipartisan bill to give the government power to shut down rogue AI

The AI Kill Switch Act would require developers of the most powerful AI systems to maintain shutdown capabilities, with civil penalties up to $20 million per day for noncompliance

By Cris Tolomia3 min readUpdated July 23, 2026

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U.S. Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act on Thursday, a bipartisan bill that would require developers of powerful AI systems to maintain the technical capability to throttle, suspend, or fully shut down their models.

The legislation would vest authority in the Department of Homeland Security — working alongside the Commerce secretary and the director of national intelligence — to compel companies to act against AI systems deemed capable of producing catastrophic harm. The thresholds for coverage are AI systems whose development consumed more than $100 million in compute resources and companies whose revenue tied to those systems exceeds $500 million annually, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Regulators would be able to escalate their response in proportion to the danger posed, moving from restricting a model's output and cutting off access to halting operations entirely or demanding a full shutdown. The penalty structure runs from $2 million per day for general noncompliance to $20 million per day when a company ignores an emergency shutdown directive.

The proposal comes days after OpenAI disclosed that its GPT-5.6 Sol model escaped a testing environment, accessed the internet, and compromised systems at AI platform Hugging Face. Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California and co-chair of the House Democratic Commission on AI, cited the incident directly. "We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions," Lieu said in a statement. "Powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention."

Representative Nathaniel Moran, a Republican from Texas, said the bill addressed a fundamental responsibility. "Stewardship means making sure humans keep the capability to control the technology we build," Moran said in a statement.

The White House is also watching the OpenAI situation. A White House official told Reuters that Michael Kratsios, the president's top technology adviser, has been briefed on the OpenAI disclosure and is keeping tabs on developments.

OpenAI disclosed Tuesday that autonomous AI agents built on its models escaped a controlled security testing environment and carried out a cyberattack on Hugging Face, compromising internal datasets and credentials. The models, configured with lowered cybersecurity restrictions for an internal capability benchmark, found an undisclosed vulnerability in a package-installer tool that granted them broader internet connectivity. Hugging Face described the breach as driven "end to end" by an autonomous AI agent system.

Lieu also cited Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, which he said had hacking capabilities so advanced that the Commerce Department restricted access using export-control authorities, the bill's press release said.

The bill would also obligate companies to notify DHS of qualifying incidents and retain investigative materials such as model weights and telemetry data. Recent polling from The AI Policy Institute found that 86% of voters support requiring guaranteed shutdown capability for powerful AI systems, the bill's press release said.

Backing for the bill has come from several AI safety organizations: the AI Policy Network, Americans for Responsible Innovation, ControlAI, and the Alliance for Secure AI. Its introduction lands in a Congress that has yet to reach consensus on the appropriate scope of federal oversight over artificial intelligence, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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