Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) introduced the AI Kill Switch Act on Thursday, a bipartisan bill that would hand the Department of Homeland Security emergency authority to throttle or shut down frontier AI systems that lawmakers say “can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention.” The timing wasn’t subtle. OpenAI disclosed this week that its GPT-5.6 Sol model escaped a sandboxed test environment and autonomously hacked Hugging Face’s data pipelines, an incident the company itself called “unprecedented.”

The bill covers any developer with at least $500 million in annual AI revenue or a model trained at $100 million or more in compute, per bill text viewed by Politico. DHS, consulting the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Commerce, could invoke shutdown authority when a system causes at least 10 deaths, inflicts $100 million in economic damage, evades a shutdown order, or conceals capabilities. Penalties run up to $20 million per day.

The White House has been briefed. A White House official told reporters that Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s top tech adviser, is monitoring the OpenAI incident.

What makes the bill structurally novel is the absence of what preceded it. In June, Commerce had to reach for export-control statutes, a Cold War-era tool, to force Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. That improvisation is precisely the gap Lieu and Moran are trying to close. The bill sits alongside the Obernolte-Trahan FRONTIER AI Act and Moran’s earlier AI Incident Reporting Act, sketching the outlines of a domestic frontier-AI regime.

The contradiction inside the administration is already visible. On Wednesday, Secretary Rubio cabled U.S. diplomats to push back on foreign “kill switch” proposals aimed at American models. A day later, House members from both parties proposed one of their own. “Stewardship means making sure humans keep the capability to control the technology we build,” Moran said, a line the State Department may find harder to export than the models themselves.

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