Before Big Tech researchers warned of a superintelligence doomsday, 2028 hopeful Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) vetoed a bill that would have made AI “kill switches” mandatory.
Page B1From§Eachthe early evening edition — 16 September 2026
AI kill switch mandate killed twice in eight days, once by veto, once by objection to a vote.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: The Kill Switch, twice.
The idea died the first time before Labor Day fully faded, and it died the second time seven days later, and in between nobody built one.…
…(cont) It began plainly enough: require the companies training artificial intelligence to install a mechanism that would let a human being turn the thing off. Not a complicated ask. A dead-man's switch for machines that boardrooms already admit they cannot fully explain.
Its first death came in Sacramento. On September 9th, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the California version, the one that would have made kill switches mandatory. Before the Big Tech researchers warning of a superintelligence doomsday had finished making their case in public, Newsom's pen had already moved.
Seven days later, in a different building, wearing a different party's jacket, the idea died again. Sen. John Kennedy brought a narrow federal version to the Senate floor Wednesday, asking for unanimous consent. Sen. Rand Paul objected — not a veto, a floor objection, the kind of procedural no that requires no vote and leaves no fingerprints — and called the mandate open-ended government overreach. The bill did not pass. It did not fail on a roll call either. It simply stopped, the way objections stop things, quietly, with nothing on the record but the transcript.
Count the deaths and you get two, in two capitals, a week apart, by two men who never had to explain what they were protecting. This is not malarkey dressed as caution; it is caution's absence dressed as principle.
The switch is survived by the models it would have governed, which continue running, untouched, unpaused, unswitched. It is preceded in death by no working prototype anywhere, because none was ever required long enough to get built. That part is not a joke. It is just the record.
In lieu of flowers, ask your senator on the record whether a machine smarter than the people who built it should come with an off button, and make them answer in writing.
“Two swings at the same idea, two misses, one in Sacramento by veto, one in the Senate by a guy who wouldn't even let it come to a vote. That's the con — every company gets to say "we take safety seriously" and nobody anywhere is required to build the thing that would prove it. When the machine you can't explain doesn't have an off switch, that's not caution, that's a business model.”
“Rand Paul isn't against safety, he's against Washington reaching into every line of code a company writes — did I say every? I mean, the important ones, the ones that matter, look, the market disciplines bad actors, that's how this works. A mandatory kill switch is exactly the kind of open-ended overreach that — okay, it's a switch, it's off or on, I'm not sure what's so open-ended about it. Next question.”
The receipts
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Wednesday blocked a request by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) to pass legislation that would require tech companies to develop a “kill switch”
A narrow measure offered by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) Wednesday that would’ve forced artificial intelligence companies to build a “kill switch” to prevent their advanced models from going rogue was shot down by Sen.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.