California Governor Orders AI Kill Switch Study After Federal Inaction

California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order directing the state to develop comprehensive AI safety requirements, including potential mandates for emergency shutdown capabilities in frontier AI models, as federal lawmakers remain unable to advance legislation.

The Friday executive order tasks a group of experts with delivering recommendations within two months on strengthening AI safety measures in state law. The directive comes as Congress has shown little ability to pass substantive AI legislation before the midterm elections, with the House in recess until November.

Proposed Safety Framework

Newsom's order instructs the expert group to consider several specific oversight mechanisms. These include requiring AI companies to host independent verification groups onsite for regular audits, subjecting transparency reports and risk assessments to independent auditor standards, and creating routinely verified kill switches. The framework would also mandate that companies report "loss-of-control incidents" as critical safety events, citing the OpenAI attack on Hugging Face as an example.

The order additionally directs a state agency to accelerate implementation of two recently signed laws: one establishing a framework for independent AI safety verifiers, and another creating a state registry of AI auditors.

Why It Matters

California's move to establish AI safety standards could create de facto national requirements, given the state's outsized influence on technology regulation and the concentration of AI companies within its borders. With President Trump stating that AI needs no controls beyond "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," and Congress gridlocked, state-level action may be the only near-term path to AI oversight in the United States.

Federal Vacuum

The executive order follows recent warnings from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who posted that AI poses more than a 10 percent chance of killing all humans within a decade. While this sparked congressional discussions, Washington observers see little prospect for legislative movement given the political calendar.

Newsom explicitly positioned his order as a model for federal adoption, calling on Congress and Trump "to review and adopt the state's framework, or use its nation-leading regulation as a floor, not a ceiling, for the benefit and safety of all Americans."

"The federal government's abject failure to create any form of meaningful AI oversight or accountability should alarm every American, especially when AI CEOs themselves are begging for regulation," Newsom said in a statement. "We're not waiting to act – we're going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it's too late."

Newsom also indicated Wednesday in an interview with Politico that he may call a special legislative session on AI, suggesting the executive order may be only the first step in California's regulatory push.

These details were first reported by The Verge.