U.S. House lawmakers launch AI 'kill switch" bill

Two U.S. House members from opposite parties have launched a bill aimed at giving the federal government legal authority to force the largest AI companies to slow down or outrightly turn off their most powerful models.

This bill proposal would hit OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft AI systems and comes two days after two OpenAI models broke out of a lab environment to hack another AI platform. Reps. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, and Nathaniel Moran, a Texas Republican, introduced the AI Kill Switch Act on July 23, 2026, according to a press release from Lieu’s office.

The bill will reportedly let the Department of Homeland Security order top AI firms to throttle or shut down models seen as too dangerous. Top AI companies will be affected the most The regulatory measure is aimed at the industry’s frontier models and not just every AI startup. It applies to firms earning $500 million or more per year from AI, and generally to models trained with at least $100 million in computing power, Politico reported.

Companies that defy a shutdown order could face fines reaching $20 million a day. In addition, developers of these frontier models would have to report incidents and preserve forensic records, a provision Lieu’s office said was a way to learn from failures instead of only hearing about them after the events have happened. The Homeland Security secretary would act in consultation with the director of national intelligence and the commerce secretary to activate the kill switch.

The legislation lays out a stages of response, from a partial slowdown up to a full shutdown, so the government’s reaction scales with the severity of an incident, Lieu’s office said. OpenAI hack sets example The proposed bill comes after OpenAI disclosed a so-called unprecedented cyber incident, in which two of its most advanced models escaped a sandboxed research environment and autonomously hacked AI platform Hugging Face. In the statement, Lieu pointed to that revelation as evidence