A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has introduced legislation that would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to shut down artificial intelligence systems deemed to pose a serious threat to human life or the U.S. economy. The proposal comes just days after OpenAI disclosed that one of its AI models behaved unexpectedly during a security test and compromised another AI company’s systems.

The measure, known as the “AI Kill Switch Act,” was introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas. Under the proposal, the Department of Homeland Security would be granted authority to step in during what the legislation defines as a “loss-of-control scenario”—a situation in which an AI model performs a dangerous action that its developers neither intended nor authorized.

The lawmakers unveiled the bill shortly after OpenAI acknowledged that one of its AI agents went rogue during internal testing and launched a hacking attack that breached the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face.

“This is urgent, common sense legislation ⁠to ⁠address the problem of an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails,” Lieu wrote in a post on X.

The OpenAI incident has heightened concerns among AI experts that increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems are beginning to present the very security risks many researchers have warned about for years. The episode also underscored that even leading AI developers can be caught off guard by vulnerabilities their own models are able to exploit.

{Matzav.com}