This Republican Senator Wants AI Labs To Create Their Own ‘Kill Switch’ but His Colleagues Say Not So Fast

A conservative Republican lawmaker, Senator John Kennedy, hopes to pass a bill on Wednesday which would force AI labs to develop and deploy their own “kill switches” — mechanisms to either slow down or halt their own AI agents if problems arise. Mr. Kennedy is facing bipartisan pushback, however. The urgency to pass such a bill comes after the chief executive of a major AI frontier lab, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, warned that AI development must be slowed immediately. He says the risks are too great to allow the models to improve exponentially for fear of agents taking over the internet. On Monday, Mr. Kennedy told reporters that he would put a simple “kill switch” bill on the Senate floor on Wednesday. Though he has not yet released the text of the bill, he says it would be simpler than a measure that is sitting in the House which would require the development of kill switches as well as the creation of a new regulatory regime to force labs to turn over forensic information to the government. On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy again said he would use a process known as a unanimous consent request to try to pass the bill. Unanimous consent requests — which allow any senator to bring a bill to the floor — almost always fail because the request can be blocked by just one other senator. “I told [Republican leadership] I wanted it done tomorrow, and if they don’t, I’m going to exercise all the power that I have to slow things down around here,” Mr. Kennedy told reporters Tuesday. Mr. Kennedy said he has not talked to President Trump — who has pushed back against the idea of imposing any regulations on AI — about his proposal. “I’m not putting the government in charge of the kill switch. I’m just saying that if you have an AI model, you’ve got to have a kill switch,” Mr. Kennedy said of his bill. “The president doesn’t want us to do anything to impede the development of American AI and he’s absolutely right,” Mr. Kennedy said later, arguing that reporters should simply “read the polls” to learn how Americans feel about AI companies. “One of the reasons [Americans are not] confident is [because] they think they’re being lied to and taken advantage of. I’m not saying they’re right to feel that way, but these are [their] feelings,” he said. The chairman of the Armed Services subcommittee on cybersecurity, Senator Mike Rounds, told the New York Sun that Mr. Kennedy’s bill is just too simplistic to meet the challenges of keeping AI under control. He told the Sun he wants “responsible development” of the technology. “It does not mean kill switches. What it does mean is you actually bring in the experts. You establish them within an office similar to” the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is a Commerce Department agency that sets standards for American manufacturing and technology development.“You [have to] allow [experts] to develop the guidelines for testing,” Mr. Rounds said. “I think that is the best long-term approach.”A member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the panels that oversees the AI sector, Senator Thom Tillis, made a similar argument to the Sun. “You’ve gotta be very, very careful if you do [a kill switch] — to make that, you know, how it actually gets triggered,” he said, warning that “malign actors” may be able to hack AI firms and set off the kill switches themselves. He said Congress should be working on establishing “AI-enabled” intelligence tools to be able to prevent such a situation if those kill switch mandates were established. “People need to realize that the reason why things are moving so quickly is because how … you’ve got the dark web [and] you’ve got the generally accepted ‘safe’ internet,” Mr. Tillis said. “We need to start thinking about not only what the AI industry needs to do, but are we getting at a level where we need a lot of fidelity on what’s occurring on these super highways.”“Part of this is educating our members on the risk of overreach,” he added. “I [understand] a kill switch in the beginning … but something a little bit more sophisticated than that, I think is smart.”One Democratic member of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Tim Kaine, chided his Republican colleagues for wanting a “kind of unregulated wild, wild west.”Mr. Kaine brought up the time he, as governor of Virginia, banned smoking in restaurants and bars.“The restaurants really wanted me to do it. Could they have done something on their own? Yeah, but nobody wanted to act on their own and disadvantage themselves compared to the restaurant across the street,” Mr. Kaine said. “[AI companies] recognize it needs to be done, but it’s really hard to limit yourself if your competitors aren’t,” Mr. Kaine said.

This Republican Senator Wants AI Labs To Create Their Own ‘Kill Switch’ but His Colleagues Say Not So Fast

This Republican Senator Wants AI Labs To Create Their Own ‘Kill Switch’ but His Colleagues Say Not So Fast

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