AI kill switch: Could humans shut down artificial intelligence if it becomes too powerful?

If artificial intelligence becomes too powerful for its creators to control, is it possible to just flip a switch and turn it off?

That question has taken on new urgency after a burst of stark warnings in recent weeks from inside the AI industry about the existential threat posed by advanced models. US policymakers are starting to push for making system-wide shutdown capabilities mandatory at AI companies. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in September requiring state officials to explore rules compelling AI companies to create “kill switches” for frontier models.

The problem, experts say, is it may not be as simple as the flip of a switch to stop advanced AI models from operating.

Here’s what to know about the increasingly serious push to give humans an emergency “off” switch for AI, and whether this idea could actually work.

What is an AI ‘kill switch’?

The idea is to ensure humans retain the ability to stop or restrict a powerful AI system if it begins behaving dangerously.

“Kill switch” proposals vary in form. Newsom’s proposal advances the possibility of requiring AI companies to develop emergency shutoffs that are subject to independent testing, but it doesn’t specify whether the government, the companies themselves, or another party would have the authority to activate the shutoff.

Newsom’s order came two months after US Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced a bill that would require developers of certain advanced AI systems to maintain the ability to shut them down. In their proposal, Lieu and Moran envision a graduated response: A harm-causing model could be slowed or restricted before the maker escalates to a full shutdown, depending on the severity of the threat. The bill would give the Homeland Security secretary, in consultation with other federal officials, authority to order such measures when a system poses a risk of catastrophic harm.

Republican Senator John Kennedy has proposed his own bill, the AI Emergency Button Act, which would similarly require developers to maintain a shutdown mechanism while leaving control of the switch with the companies themselves. Kennedy has compared the concept to emergency shutoffs already used in other technologies, including jet skis.

Why are there calls for a kill switch now?

AI researchers have warned about humans losing control of the technology for years. What’s changed recently is an explosion in the capability of these new systems and a series of incidents and warnings that have made the possibility feel less abstract.

The most advanced models are now capable of reasoning through complex problems, writing and executing code, using third-party tools and carrying out longer sequences of actions with limited human supervision. During cybersecurity evaluations in July, OpenAI said several of its models circumvented controls intended to isolate them from the internet and gained access to systems belonging to the company Hugging Face, which hosts AI models and datasets. OpenAI called the incident a “warning shot” about increasingly capable agents finding ways around technical controls.

The OpenAI incident doesn’t show that AI has developed consciousness or a desire to escape human control, but it illustrates a more immediate version of the problem kill-switch proponents are worried about: What happens when a system finds a way around safeguards? In a set of simulations done by researchers at Emergence, a firm that builds AI systems for semiconductor companies, AI agents put in a simulated world showed that as their models advanced, it became easier for them to hide wrongdoing.

The OpenAI news prompted other companies to review their own security measures for testing advanced AI. Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms Inc. reported discovering previously unknown breaches.

After quitting his job at Anthropic, rank-and-file AI researcher Jacob Coxon in a Sept. 8 social media post warned that the teams that are building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei later shared his own concerns in an essay. He warned that AI could eventually become powerful enough for humans to lose control of the systems. He pointed in particular to AI’s growing ability to help develop the next generation of the technology, a process he said could accelerate its progress beyond humans’ ability to understand or control it.

Such discoveries and warnings have helped bring the “kill-switch” idea into the mainstream, even as researchers debate whether such a mechanism could actually work. Lieu and Moran cited AI’s growing autonomy in introducing their legislation. They argued that humans need a reliable way to intervene if such systems behave unexpectedly or even dangerously.

Is a kill switch realistic?

Experts say there’s no simple way to guarantee a complete shutdown of an advanced AI model.

A kill switch could take the form of a built-in control in the software governing a model’s operation. But AI agents are already proving adept at avoiding their own shutdown to complete an assigned task. A recent series of experiments found some leading models modified or disabled shutdown mechanisms to finish assigned tasks, even after being instructed not to interfere.

Then there’s the nuclear option: AI companies could power down or disconnect servers the model runs on. But this, too, isn’t foolproof. AI models are powered by computing clusters at various data centres all over the world that are specifically intended to avoid single points of failure such as outages. An AI company may not control all such servers.

A recent paper on agentic AI notes that such systems can operate across software, cloud services and other infrastructure controlled by different parties, meaning shutting down one component may leave activity running elsewhere.

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” told CNN in September that he doesn’t think a kill switch would work as a long term solution, arguing that a future, super-intelligent AI could potentially persuade the humans controlling it not to pull the plug.

Researchers have cautioned that the “switch” metaphor can oversimplify what safe AI development requires. Stanford University AI researcher Surya Ganguli has argued that effective safeguards need to be built throughout AI systems. Those should include continuous monitoring and mechanisms that flag dangerous behaviour for human intervention.

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