The AI Kill Switch Act is repeating the Clipper Chip’s mistakes
Brief
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
Policymakers alarmed by the recent incidents of autonomous AI agents breaking through guardrails to hack other companies seem to have Murphy’s Law on the mind – and who can blame them? When agents’ behavior becomes unpredictable, it’s easy to imagine any number of scenarios where they’re running amok.
To address this amorphous and evolving risk, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) have proposed the AI Kill Switch Act, which would give the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) the power to order frontier AI labs to install the ability to throttle, suspend, or shut down their systems if needed.
Unfortunately, fixing this problem won’t be that simple.