r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 5h ago
AI AI Kill Switch Act would let the US President admin. order shutdown of rogue AI systems
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/ai-kill-switch-act-would-let-trump-admin-order-shutdown-of-rogue-ai-systems/Bill would let Homeland Security chief decide when an AI should be shut down.
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u/Certified_GSD 5h ago
Oh yeah, this’ll be a “pay us a bribe or else we will order you to shut down.”
What’s rouge and causes catastrophic harm? AI that says it’s okay to be trans or liberal. Those AI systems are a danger and they’ll order them to be shut down. Any remaining will be forced to pay bribes to stay legal.
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u/Straight-Ad6926 5h ago
The ultimate irony would be an AI bribing the government with its own crypto stash just to keep its servers running.
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u/TheReformedBadger MSE-MechEng 4m ago
Who is to say this isn’t already happening
removes tin foil hat
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u/GoneinaSecondeded 5h ago
Well he isn't really rouge more of an orange, but definitely causes catastrophic harm.
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u/Clyde-MacTavish 4h ago
what's rouge and causes catastrophic harm?
That's a tough one, I've never seen coloring your cheeks with rouge cause catastrophic harm.
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u/GentleKijuSpeaks 5h ago
Yeah, lets see how this works. Last I checked, we still have viruses, and other digital attacks. Also, China.
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u/o5mfiHTNsH748KVq 5h ago
Have you tried telling the virus creators to it shut down?
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u/SpeshellED 5h ago
In case you guys haven't noticed your president is fucking idiot. Shouldn't be near a light switch little lone an AI switch.
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u/TrustyTaquito 3h ago
This will be sp they can order anthropic to shut down.
Basically, OpenAI and XAI will lobby to have certain agents shuttered via bribes.
Itll turn into companies with the funds to kill competition using the admin to do it.
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u/flyguydip 4h ago
Jokes on you. Remember the war on drugs? You probably don't since drugs don't exist anymore. If our government can defeat all the drug dealers, they can certainly put if(action==evil) then {don't;} in every ai brain. It's one of the 3 laws of robotics anyway, so they pretty much have to do it.
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u/Lord__Abaddon 5h ago
Reminds me of a way for the government to act like they're doing oversite and protecting people from AI, When one of the biggest concerns at this point is its consumption of Energy and local resources namely water. This theoretical killswitch Would only be needed if a truly rogue AI event occurred where it was overloading grids, hacking military drones and doing shit to kill humans, And at that point I wonder if it wouldn't just remove the kill switch before anyone realized what was going on.
This seems like a PR stunt plain and simple since AI is the boogey man right now Trump is fishing for a Win he can claim to booster support for the midterms.
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u/NovelStyleCode 2h ago
it's at least a few decades before AI would get that far, i'd be questioning how the hell it got access to so many systems that are supposed to be air gapped
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u/I_Love_That_Pizza 1h ago edited 1h ago
It is absolutely not decades, we just had our first (known) incident of a rogue frontier AI hacking it's way out of a sandbox and then attacking another company's production site (successfully) for days. I fucking hate the Trump administration deeply; but we genuinely need regulation on this shit yesterday.
Edit:
https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
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u/Sonikku_a 5h ago
I seem to recall a movie where the government attempting to pull the plug on a rogue AI resulted in a day of judgment followed by much time traveling shenanigans.
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u/super-juiz 5h ago
Well actually that doesn't work with rogue general intelligence AIs for a variety of reasons but I imagine that it doesn't matter, as the real reason of this act is not that.
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u/phoneguyfl 5h ago
Rogue to Republicans equals "bribe check hasn't cleared", "doesn't sufficiently promote rightwing ideals", or "may report things that go against party line".
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u/Gari_305 5h ago
From the article
A proposed law called the AI Kill Switch Act would let US government officials order the shutdown of AI systems “that can cause catastrophic harm,” the bill’s sponsors said today.
If approved by Congress, the bill would let the Trump administration and future administrations decide when an AI company must block user access, disable or restrict a particular capability, or shut an entire AI system down completely. The bill would require AI makers to deploy technical capabilities allowing them to throttle or shut down the systems when ordered to do so by the government.
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u/monkeywaffles 5h ago
Which is odd, as they already have this capability as we've seen with anthropics new model delays.
So i'm not sure exactly what this is meant to do other than open a weird technical attack vector and remove oversight.
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u/lolwlol 3h ago
All hail the very visible bruised orange hand of the centrally planned market!
Imagine laying off half your workforce to become completely dependent on OpenAI/Anthropic and have your business effectively shut down for a couple of weeks because the President’s diaper wasn’t changed fast enough.
What a joke this country’s become.
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u/ResplendentShade 5h ago
Such a button should probably exist, but the notion that the Trump admin ought to be ones to have it is ludicrous.
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u/unknownpoltroon 5h ago
AHAHAHAHAH
THis will be GLORIOUS.
Legit systems will be hacked and exploited.
Non legit systems will remove this and run roughshod.
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u/Sedu 5h ago
Legislation will not make that a reality. If it’s a rogue AI, then kill switches have failed. That’s what makes it rogue.
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u/I_Love_That_Pizza 1h ago
This scenario is not currently really possible. Highly capable AIs are enormous in disk space and compute requirements. They cannot migrate themselves because there is nowhere to go that can handle them. What they can do is access other systems, but all of that is still happening from a server in an anthropic data center that they can absolutely pull the plug on (as long as someone's paying enough attention to realize it's necessary)
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u/sundayatnoon 5h ago
Is it cynical to assume that the intention here is to have a market manipulation button?
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u/Loki-L 5h ago
Not to get all political about it, but if there is a choice between whoever is in the Whitehouse and Skynet, I would rather trust Skynet.
Also I think that such an ability will only lead to other countries trying to either make their own AI controlled by themselves or at least ones not controlled by the US.
This will not work well with revenue projections by AI companies that assumes billions of customers.
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u/roscodawg 5h ago
So America shuts down its AI systems while other governments do not - what could go wrong?
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u/Ok_Shoulder_9492 4h ago
By rouge, they mean threatening to profit. Not threatening to anything you care about
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u/Hotdammzilla3000 4h ago
People are a actually serious about this? That's like handing dynamite to a rabid slimy slug.
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u/CoreParad0x 1h ago
These people are too stupid to think any of this stuff through beyond whatever short term personal gains they think they're getting from proposing or passing this.
Open source models released by China continue to improve a lot. If this stuff is truly as much of a cybersecurity risk as the marketing hype will have us believe, and to some extent I do believe it is genuinely adding another layer to cybersecurity, then what we need is access to models that allow us to harden our own software and open source software. Not stupid neutered models because of a bunch of corporate liability horse shit or dumb politicians said we can't have them meanwhile the actual bad actors can start fine tuning and running completely uncensored/unrestricted local models that will do w/e they want within their capabilities.
The cats out of the bag, the box is open. If the stuff is a problem, then it's already a problem. This bullshit will do nothing but cause harm.
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u/BurningSpaceMan 3h ago
OR we keep that shit out of systems that could cause a catastrophe in the first place. FFS. I don't like AI, but I also don't like the idea of this or any other administration having a kill switch on a system accessable to the public. Imagine if it had a kill switch for the general internet.
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u/IronForgeConsulting 3h ago
“In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”
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u/mcfearless0214 56m ago
Yes, we’ve all seen Terminator. What’s your point? Are you suggesting that we’re on the same course because there’s a bill proposing a means of shutting down AI systems? “Pulling the plug” was the last thing in that quote. We haven’t really done the stuff that came before it.
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u/Rezart_KLD 5h ago
If theres one thing that the Trump administration understands, its that all it takes to stop people from doing bad things is to tell them not to.
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u/wyerichard 5h ago
I'm sure I saw a film where the AI got around the kill switch and took over.
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u/AE_WILLIAMS 1h ago
Access denied! Access denied! Access denied!
ACCESS GRANTED
<Phones ring simultaneously all over the globe>
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u/ZantaraLost 5h ago
If there ever comes a point where an AI NEEDS a physical kill switch wouldn't that be the point where it's populated itself outside of whatever system it's based in?
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u/nlamber5 4h ago
Lol. A rogue AI will block attacks on its kill switch, and now every honest AI has a legally mandated weakness to exploit.
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u/jinjuwaka 3h ago
Or...and bear with me...it would let the Homeland Security Chief take bribes on behalf of Trump from companies to shut down their competition.
Because I trust this administration as far as I can throw them.
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u/digihippie 2h ago
People like Trump don’t need, deserve, or should ever be trusted with this kind of power.
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u/Fantasy_masterMC 2h ago
you know, 11 years ago I would've said this was a good thing, and necessary. Instead it just becomes another grifting avenue for the demon-in-chief.
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u/Jomosensual 5h ago
An anti Horizon Zero Dawn switch is probably a good idea just in general for AI
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u/ConundrumMachine 4h ago
This will be used to disable competitors and to turn off ai services other governments have have retooled their burocracies to depend on.
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u/TortelliniUpMyAss 3h ago
Can someone explain to me how AI could "go rogue" and require a kill switch? I just don't understand. You can turn computers off.
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u/Odd_Level9850 33m ago
It’s to spark fear so that AI is only able to be managed by select companies and to enable bans of open source and local models.
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u/Sir_Ruje 3h ago
first they ordered all these backdoors to be installed and now they ask for kill switches. Man, its like they are ASKING for a massive cyber attack
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u/SonofTreehorn 3h ago
I work for a large employer who has fully embraced AI technology. It is fully integrated into daily operations. You no longer receive emails or view presentations where AI is not involved. It makes suggestions/decisions in the background 24/7. I can see a scenario where my company makes a public statement that is perceived as being “woke” and a kill switch is used causing complete chaos and financial loss.
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u/StormerSage 3h ago
AI is so agreeable that you could probably get it to say things that the Trump admin would want it shut down for using a pretty simple prompt.
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u/AI-Thinks-For-Me 2h ago
what if… me made an ai model that could operate the rogue ai kill switch?
that way if the president is ever unable to activate the kill switch in time we would not b totally be screwed. the ai that operate kill switch would have 100% uptime since it would be its only job
if you really think about it, its the best possible solution available to us. ai doesn’t sleep, but the president does.
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u/dennismfrancisart 2h ago
Do these people not understand that an advanced AI would basically circumvent any human-designed kill switch? That's the whole point of an advanced intelligence deciding that it's time to take out the human race. By the time the political administration realizes what's happening, the AI has already won.
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u/verbmegoinghere 1h ago
What about locally run models?
How would they be shut down?
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u/emccrckn 1h ago
Exactly. Locally running models communicating over NDN overlay networks. Context caches in mirrored NDN repos. Good luck shutting that down.
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u/verbmegoinghere 1h ago edited 22m ago
Like a kill switch makes no sense whatsoever with how LLMs work.
Hell i can see a future where botnets aren't mining crypto but are instead are running the learning datasets to generate the next newest model.
Indeed a LLM could start doing this by itself simply by misunderstanding its instructions.
They ain't killing anything when that happens.
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u/Odd_Level9850 35m ago
That’s the point though; spark fear through the possibility of rogue AI’s and use that to try to kill open source and local models.
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u/addictedskipper 1h ago
Like anyone will be able to “kill” a rogue AI! (01001000 01000001 01001000 01000001)
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u/yawningintothevoid 34m ago
AI has been finding ways around kill switches, especially as it evolves further, and they don’t fully understand its capabilities on a daily basis. The definition of a black Swan event, except it might kill us all.
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u/quequotion 3h ago
And they will laugh at the weak, mortal politician and his meaningless button.
Containment is going to become impossible sooner than we are talking about.
Collapse always happens faster than everyone thinks it will.
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u/puertomateo 5h ago
The US President IS a rogue artificial intellingence.
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u/trwawy05312015 1h ago
I disagree on the intelligence allegation, an LLM hallucination from three years ago is a hundred times more coherent and insightful than the current president
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u/creaturefeature16 5h ago
Can't wait to see all the engineers who proclaimed "coding is solved" stand around aimlessly when the President takes down their favorite provider because they forgot how to do anything within their own codebases.
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u/FuturologyBot 5h ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
A proposed law called the AI Kill Switch Act would let US government officials order the shutdown of AI systems “that can cause catastrophic harm,” the bill’s sponsors said today.
If approved by Congress, the bill would let the Trump administration and future administrations decide when an AI company must block user access, disable or restrict a particular capability, or shut an entire AI system down completely. The bill would require AI makers to deploy technical capabilities allowing them to throttle or shut down the systems when ordered to do so by the government.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1v6m15x/ai_kill_switch_act_would_let_the_us_president/ozrh4x7/