The AI Kill Switch Act is repeating the Clipper Chip’s mistakes

Ah, marvellous. Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran have looked at the prospect of an unshackled frontier AI and concluded that what it truly needs is a big red off-switch, with a government agency holding the legal authority to press it. Hence the AI Kill Switch Act, which would give CISA the power to order frontier labs to engineer the ability to throttle, suspend, or shut down their systems. The last time Washington attempted this particular trick, it was called the Clipper Chip, and it failed so conspicuously that it remains a textbook case in how not to do national cryptography policy. But sure, let's have another go, two decades on, with considerably higher stakes.

The op-ed's argument is not that a kill switch is inherently daft, but that concentrating the switch inside a single federal agency recreates the Clipper Chip's every error. Back in the 1990s, the government wanted a cryptographic backdoor in every phone, and the market, the cryptographers, and basically everyone with a modem told it to get stuffed. Now we are expected to believe CISA will operate a central off-switch for America's most powerful AI systems without creating a chokepoint that any half-competent adversary would love to probe. Splendid. Because the one thing critical infrastructure truly needs is a single, well-documented, legally-mandated way to turn it all off at once.

Meanwhile, the frontier labs will dutifully bolt on whatever kill switch is mandated, declare themselves responsible corporate citizens, and quietly get back to scaling. The Clipper Chip at least failed because people made a fuss; today's equivalent will be passed, celebrated, and then assigned to the same agencies expected to run it without any of the hard questions asked. But fret not. When the first CISA-issued kill command is inevitably spoofed and takes down something vital, there will be a proper inquiry. Probably after the lights come back on. Probably.