This simple safety solution may not work

So is artificial intelligence going to kill us all?

The question has echoed around dinner tables and family group texts in recent days as AI doomerism has hit a fever pitch. Former OpenAI and Anthropic researchers last week rocked the world by warning that AI could destroy humanity — and relatively soon.

Now, the world’s most powerful people are divided on whether the world is doomed or it’s all a nothingburger. They also can’t agree on a path forward.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s richest man, supported the call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to pace the development of the most advanced models. Amodei’s rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, also backed the effort.

President Donald Trump called it a “hoax,” while Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, said, “We don’t need new regulations.”

As runaway AI worries reached a crescendo, policymakers in Washington have renewed calls for a magic stop button for AI, otherwise known as a kill switch.

A House Kill Switch Act was introduced this summer after OpenAI revealed that a swarm of its agents broke free of a testing environment and hacked open-source developer platform Hugging Face. The bill would grant the Department of Homeland Security emergency authority to force labs to throttle or shut down models.

A kill switch proposal was quickly shot down in the Senate this week.

On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to create a group of experts tasked with building an AI safety guide to strengthen regulations for the state. A kill switch was one of the elements to consider.

The concept sounds like a nice, clean solution to an incredibly complex and difficult problem.

But the reality of a simple shutdown mechanism is far from easy.

“My perspective is it’s not too little, but it’s probably too late,” said Nick Warner, CEO at cyber startup Neo and former executive at SentinelOne. “I’m not sure it’s going to be a panacea to solve all the myriad problems that AI is presenting, along with all of the benefits that it presents.”

A logistics and control nightmare

Kill switches have long been used on the factory floor to shut down machines when operations go awry. In an interconnected digital world, that’s a logistical nightmare.

Over the past few years, hyperscalers like Meta Platforms, Alphabet and Amazon have poured billions into data centers scattered across the globe. These sprawling facilities are equipped with thousands of machines, chips, servers and backup systems to save workloads in the event of an outage.

That’s what makes implementing a kill switch extremely challenging, said Mark Nitzberg, executive director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We have to first deal with this redundancy,” he said. “Our kill switch has to turn off the main systems and the redundant systems as well.”

Nitzberg said shutting down AI could also disrupt dependent critical infrastructure, leaving the power grid or…