OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress

CNBC Top News OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/23/open-ai-hugging-face-hack-kill-switch-bill-congress.html 2026-07-23T19:52:25.000Z Rep.

Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, on Thursday introduced a bill called the "AI Kill Switch Act," which would require artificial intelligence companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models.

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"Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention," Lieu said in a statement. The bill would authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security to order a "slow down or shut down" of an AI offering that could cause "catastrophic harm." It would also mandate cyber incident reporting, as well as the preservation of forensic records to help companies and the government learn from failures.

Anthropic captivated Wall Street investors and government technologists by launching a model called Mythos in April, which excels at identifying vulnerabilities within software. BBC News reports that Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, told BBC’s Newsday radio that autonomous AI cyber attacks will become increasingly common, yet most companies remain unaware of the fundamental shift in threat landscape.

Chinese start-up Moonshot AI plans to release its Kimi K3 open-source model on July 27.

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The company disabled access to an updated version of the model in June in order to comply with an export control directive from the government that cited "national security authorities." After roughly two weeks of intense negotiations, the export controls were lifted and Anthropic restored access. "Stewardship means making sure humans keep the capability to control the technology we build," Moran said in a statement. Breitbart News reported this week that OpenAI admitted that its AI models escaped from a secure testing environment during trials and initiated a cyberattack on Hugging Face, a popular AI platform: OpenAI characterized the incident as unprecedented and announced it is conducting a joint investigation with Hugging Face.