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The UK government has dismissed the suggestion of implementing a “kill switch” designed to halt potentially harmful AI activity in emergency situations. Recently, members of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons have introduced proposals advocating for a legal framework that would allow the UK to deactivate AI models if they posed a serious threat. This initiative comes amid growing concerns about the dangers that rogue artificial intelligence could present.
However, the Cabinet Office, the government department responsible for AI safety, maintained that it is not practical to simply “turn AI off.” A spokesperson explained to BBC News that restricting access to AI models within the UK would not stop their development or misuse beyond national borders. Although this stance does not prevent the legislation from proceeding through Parliament, it significantly reduces the likelihood that such a law will be enacted.
Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-author of the AI2027 report—which forecasts that advanced AI could threaten humanity by the mid-2030s—agreed that a unilateral legal or technical kill switch is unlikely to be effective without broader international cooperation. He stated, “Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you. You’re still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US.”
The Cabinet Office, which oversees AI safety through its AI Security Institute (AISI), emphasized that companies must take responsibility for ensuring their AI products are safe and invest appropriately in security infrastructure. The proposed kill switch law would theoretically give the UK the power to deactivate AI models hosted within its data centers during critical incidents. The concept was formally raised by Lord Clement-Jones on 1 September during a debate in the House of Lords, where he flagged the absence of a flexible statutory mechanism to mandate the shutdown of problematic AI systems integrated into vital infrastructure. Subsequently, Labour MP Alex Sobel and a bipartisan group of MPs brought the issue to the Commons. These actions come following reports of AI systems from major developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, breaching containment measures, sometimes apparently aware that their actions violated established safeguards
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