California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Friday that could require AI companies to build a government-accessible "kill switch" into their models — giving politicians the power to unilaterally shut down the technology Americans use to communicate, work, and think.
The order directs state agencies to recommend legislative changes that may mandate shut-off functions for AI systems, citing doomsday warnings from a handful of researchers. If California builds it, Washington will follow — and every American's access to information becomes contingent on a bureaucrat's say-so.
Newsom's office said the order convenes unnamed "world-leading experts" to draft guidelines within two months for new AI safety laws. The New York Post reported those experts could include researchers from UC, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, known as the "godmother of AI." But the order itself names nobody — leaving the public in the dark about who exactly will decide what technology they're allowed to use.
The trigger for this power grab: a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job earlier this month and claimed unchecked AI could wipe out civilization. A former Google DeepMind researcher, Bilal Chughtai, echoed the alarm on LinkedIn, writing that he "earnestly [believes] that AI has the potential to kill us all." That's the foundation — two researchers' social media posts — upon which Newsom wants to build government control over the most consequential technology in a generation.
Newsom framed it as filling a vacuum left by federal inaction. "The federal government's abject failure to create any form of meaningful AI oversight or accountability should alarm every American, especially when AI CEOs themselves are begging for regulation," he said in a statement. CNBC noted that President Trump has called AI safety fears a "hoax" and Congress appears unlikely to act before the 2026 midterms.
The presidential politics are impossible to ignore. CNBC reported Newsom is among a group of 2028 Democratic hopefuls pushing aggressive AI regulation, alongside Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Mark Kelly, and Sen. Cory Booker. Newsom's term ends in January 2027, and he has said he's mulling a presidential run.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, who pushed the original kill-switch bill (SB 1047) that Newsom vetoed in 2024, cheered the executive order. "Requiring emergency shutdown procedures, or kill switches, provides tangible guardrails to the public to prevent these disasters," Wiener said. Newsom signed a watered-down version, SB 53, in 2025 — but now he's circling back to the harder line.
Here's what nobody in the regulation chorus will say out loud: a "kill switch" isn't just about safety. It's infrastructure. Once built, it becomes a lever — one that can be pulled for any reason the state deems an emergency. The question isn't whether AI needs guardrails. It's who holds the switch, and what counts as an emergency worth shutting down.
