Gavin Newsom Demands California Design an AI Kill Switch After Vetoing That Exact Law

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a California executive order on Friday, 18 September 2026, creating a panel to recommend stronger AI safety rules. The Los Angeles Times (Dakota Smith and Queenie Wong, 18 September 2026) said those recommendations include a possible kill switch for programs that go rogue.

The Next Web said the working group has about two months to report. The order also asks whether independent third parties should write safety plans.

This is an executive order. It is not a statute that already requires labs to install a working kill switch, and it is not a federal law.

Newsom vetoed SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, on 29 September 2024. That bill would have required developers of covered models to be able to "promptly enact a full shutdown," stopping operation and further training. He then argued it regulated by model size and cost rather than by use.

Newsom said a kill switch "means a lot of things depending on who you talk to," and that the panel should flesh out what the phrase means. The order landed a day after Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro made a similar AI-safeguard plea, amid employee and expert catastrophe warnings and the Anthropic and OpenAI pace fight.

On his podcast, Newsom said there is still no comprehensive federal law requiring AI companies to report dangerous incidents, and that President Trump has rejected new regulation. Newsom summed up that stance as "Let it rip" and said Trump is "dead wrong." Trump has called apocalyptic AI warnings a hoax, which does not settle the technical debate.

TechNet said it will work with Newsom. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said no new regulation is needed and that safety is an engineering hold-back problem. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for pacing the frontier, a split that also sits next to China calling slowdown warnings fear mongering.

Sen. Christopher Cabaldon plans fall hearings and said California already regulates a barber or sandwich shop more tightly than a company that says it may be ending humanity. Sen. Scott Wiener, who wrote the 2024 bill, called the order a challenge to pass strong guardrails early next year.

Since 2 August, the European Commission can restrict, withdraw, or recall a general-purpose model under the AI Act. That power sits with the regulator, not a company-built switch. Geoffrey Hinton told CNN a kill switch may fail because AI would "persuade the people in charge of the switch not to pull the switch." Those remain expert views, not a California mandate.

Related tape includes the labs' joint standards-body talks.

If you run or buy frontier models in California, treat Friday's order as a two-month recommendation clock, not a live shutdown mandate, and decide now whether you can show a prompt full shutdown if the Legislature writes that into statute early next year.