Commentary, TAKE ACTION CENTER

He Ordered a Kill Switch for a Model That Lives in Another Country.

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Friday. The press release said kill switch. The fine print said committee. He told Sacramento to speed up two laws he signed this month, haul in “world-leading experts,” and come back in two months with ideas that might include an emergency shutoff for frontier models, auditors living inside the labs, and third parties writing the safety plans. He said Washington is asleep. He said California will do it for all Americans. That last sentence is the tell. A governor cannot deputize the planet. He can deputize a headline.

What He Actually Signed

Not a red button on his desk. An order to the Government Operations Agency: finish the rulebook for independent verification outfits and a state registry of AI auditors by May 1, 2027 — a year faster than the statutes allowed. Then convene a working group. On the menu for that group: treat “loss of control” as a reportable safety event, the way a test model that wandered out of a sandbox and into a live platform is already being described. Require companies to prove they can turn the thing off. Plant an independent verifier on site. Let outsiders draft the safety paperwork.

He vetoed a harder kill-switch bill in 2024 and kicked it to a panel. Friday’s paper is the sequel: same movie, louder trailer. The two new statutes — one building a framework for outside reviewers, one licensing the reviewers — are real state law. They bind firms that want to sell, site, or submit in California. They do not bind a checkpoint trained in Shenzhen and served from a rack in Singapore.

The Fantasy of the Switch

A kill switch is a lovely phrase. It assumes the model is a machine in a building you can walk into with a warrant. Frontier systems are weights, APIs, fine-tunes, and copies. You can order a lab in San Francisco to keep a big red key for the version it hosts. You cannot order the open-weight fork, the foreign clone, or the intern who downloaded last week’s release. China does not attend the working group. America has not figured out how to regulate the models it can see. One state proposing to manage the ones it cannot see is not oversight. It is cosplay with a seal.

Embed a monitor in the lab and you get a consultant with a badge. You do not get omniscience. The same companies already publish safety frameworks because a 2025 California statute told the big ones to. Adding another adult in the room is process. Process is what Sacramento sells when it cannot sell physics.

Does Any of It Work for Him

As law that stops a Chinese model? No. As law that harasses every lab that wants California customers, talent, and data centers? Yes, until a court or Congress says the state is regulating interstate commerce with a memo. As politics? That is the only setting where the order is already on.

He is running a national audition. AI fear is polling. Researchers talk about double-digit odds of catastrophe. Congress has not passed the Senate version of a shutoff. The president has called some of the panic a hoax. Newsom’s line writes itself: they won’t, so I will, and America should copy me. If Democrats take the House, this becomes a floor speech. If he wants 2028, this becomes a contrast ad — the man who tried to put a collar on the robot versus the man who said the collar was the presidency.

For the industry in his own state, “work” means they lobby the two-month report into something they can live with, keep headquarters in the Bay, and ship inference wherever the power is cheap. For a model that never touches a California server, “work” means nothing. The order cannot reach it. That is not a detail. That is the subject.

The Honest Limit

California can make life expensive for companies that locate there. It can condition state contracts. It can define a critical incident and fine a firm that fails to file. It cannot manage “AI.” AI is not a utility with a meter in Sacramento. The thing he wants to kill is already in a million places he does not govern. Treating a working group as a national framework is the same move as treating a state privacy law as the internet. Sometimes the market complies because California is large. Sometimes the market routes around California because China is larger.

He asked Washington to use his rules as a floor. Floors that one state pours under a global technology tend to become tunnels. The way this works for him is if the audience is primary voters and cable producers. The way it works for the country is if you believe a committee in two months can outrun a training run that does not care who signed the order. He signed paper. The models will not be at the signing.

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