Gavin Newsom’s executive order increases AI oversight, proposes ‘kill switch’

California has a new sheriff, and he has brought a kill switch. Gavin Newsom's executive order on artificial intelligence, as reported by the Daily Bruin, expands third-party oversight of the technology and proposes the phrase every headline writer in Sacramento had been praying for. A kill switch. Borrowed from 1950s serials and bolted onto a document requiring no legislature, no committee, no vote and no argument with anyone who might disagree. An executive order, after all, is a press release with better stationery.

The oversight, we are told, will be 'third-party.' Third parties paid by whom, answerable to whom, and what happens when the third party's own model turns out to be the thing that needs switching off? That question is absent, because it is always absent from documents like this one. Note too the report's careful construction: the order 'could effectively regulate emerging technologies' — could, a modal verb carrying the weight of an entire enforcement apparatus, which is roughly how AI governance now gets done, in the subjunctive mood, with a photographer present and a policy team already drafting the follow-up.

We have been here before, and rather recently, which is the part nobody enjoys. When Sen. Patty Murray convened state policymakers because federal action on AI was sputtering, we noted the pattern of legislators substituting meetings for statutes. Now a governor substitutes a signature for a statute and gets a kill switch for his trouble — proposed, naturally, which is the safest kind of kill switch there is. It kills absolutely nothing, offends nobody at all, and photographs beautifully from any angle. Somewhere in California a compliance consultancy is updating its rate card this morning, and the third party remains unnamed, because the third party is eventually you, at your own expense.