John Kennedy Introducing Bill To Require ‘Kill Switch’ On AI Models

Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy announced Monday he would introduce legislation requiring artificial intelligence (AI) models to have a “kill switch.”

Kennedy said all AI models should have a kill switch to allow companies to completely shut down any AI model if they act amorally or immorally outside of human control. The bill is expected to be released Wednesday.

“The other risk that has garnered most of the attention is that we’re not dealing with a tool to make our lives better. We’re dealing with a brand new species that acts like a human, but without most of the values that decent humans share. And that is that AI would, through the recursive self improvement, would start acting on its own in an amoral or immoral way,” Kennedy said. “To me, until we can figure out how to address that, if indeed it’s a serious problem, to me, the answer is to ask all the AI models to have a kill switch.”

Kennedy said the government would not control the kill switch.

“Now I don’t know why they all don’t have kill switches right now, but that’s all my bill would do,” Kennedy continued. “And it wouldn’t put the federal government in charge of the kill switch. It would say every AI model has to have a kill switch, so they can shut those puppies down if they start acting like the terminator.”

Tech leaders and prominent AI researchers resigned from major labs and warned that AI development must slow down to prevent a serious risk to humanity. Many leaders, including former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, warned that AI could kill all humanity within the next decade.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published a letter Saturday arguing AI could outrun humans’ ability to understand or control what they were creating.

President Donald Trump said Monday that the warnings against AI are a “sick conspiracy” and argued no guardrails were needed. Many lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said guardrails needed to be put in place.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Trump rightly highlighted the competitive race with China over AI and the “irrational fears” about AI.

“What [Trump] doesn’t want is he doesn’t want our AI industry destroyed because of irrational fears. There are obviously concerns,” Moreno told the DCNF. “If there’s people like Anthropic that have concerns, then why are they doing an IPO? Think about that. Like, I Dario is so concerned about the very technologies he’s creating, why is he doing an IPO? He should, in fact, just shut down his entire company if he’s so concerned about what he’s creating. The reality is that’s an alarmist point of view.”

Republican Missouri Sen. John Hawley opened a probe into OpenAI over the response to its AI agents hacking New York-based AI startup Hugging Face.