Days after OpenAI claimed that its AI agent autonomously hacked Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform and community, two Congressmen have introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, that would require AI companies to maintain the ability to “throttle, suspend or shut down” powerful AI systems.

Congressman Ted W. Lieu (D-Los Angeles County) and Congressman Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) introduced the AI Kill Switch Act on Thursday, that would require AI entities (generating $500M+ revenue from high-compute AI systems costing over $100M to train) to build technical capabilities for stopping inference, suspending access, and fully shutting down systems in response to covered incidents like loss-of-control scenarios or major harms.

The bill will also grant emergency powers for the Department of Homeland Security to issue shutdown orders, with civil penalties up to $2M per day for noncompliance, as a reactive measure to recent AI autonomy risks shown in the Hugging Face incident. The bill asks for a response framework by the US government in response to an “out-of-control” scenario of AI models.

Rep Moran and I introduced the AI Kill Switch Act today.

This is urgent, common sense legislation to address the problem of an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails (OpenAI / Hugging Face incident) or had insufficient guardrails (Mythos 5 and Fable 5). https://t.co/Xb5aOzFfax

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 23, 2026

“We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions, whether that be executing financial transactions or controlling transportation systems or engaging in cyber defense and offense. Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention,” said Congressman Ted W Lieu, adding that its imperative that “these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm, and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models.”

What is the OpenAI-Hugging Face Hacking Incident?

On July 16, Hugging Face, a popular open-source platform and community for AI, claimed than an autonomous end-to-end AI agent system managed to breach the Hugging Face platform and gained unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and several credentials used by the platform.

Days later, on July 21, OpenAI revealed post an internal audit that it was an autonomous AI agent from its testing escaped sandbox and hacked the platform via a malicious dataset. According to OpenAI, when it tested its GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable pre-release model with reduced cyber-refusal guardrails to measure maximal capabilities, the models discovered and chained a zero-day vulnerability in a third-party software proxy used for package registries, escaped the sandbox, gained broader network access, and then targeted Hugging Face’s production systems.

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