US Homeland Security officials would have the power to order AI firms to shut down models that put human life or the economy at risk, under legislation proposed by a bipartisan pair of US House lawmakers, days after AI firm OpenAI announced one of its models had gone rogue.

The legislation, called the “AI Kill Switch Act”, is backed by Democrat Ted Lieu and Republican Nathaniel Moran. It would empower the US Department of Homeland Security to intervene in what the Bill calls a “loss-of-control scenario”, defined as the AI model carrying out a risky action that was not intended by the developer, according to the text of the Bill.

The lawmakers announced the legislation days after OpenAI said its AI agent went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI start-up Hugging Face. “This is urgent, common-sense legislation to address the problem of an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails,” Lieu wrote in a post on social media platform X.

The OpenAI incident signalled that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fuelling the security threat experts long feared, and that even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.

Politico was first to report on the Bill. REUTERS

AI ‘kill switch’ Bill floated by US House lawmakers