Sen. John Kennedy, R-LA., plans to introduce legislation requiring that all AI models be built with a kill switch, he announced Wednesday.
Kennedy said he plans to introduce the legislation on the Senate floor on Wednesday and attempt to pass it by unanimous consent.
"I'm going to move. I've already told him I'm move my bill tomorrow. requiring all of the AI models to have a kill switch," Kennedy said Tuesday.
"And I told them, I'm sure there's some people that don't want to. I know there's some people that don't like the idea, or they don't want to move it or they have a bad breakfast. I don't know, I don't, I don't care. They need to call somebody who does care," he added.
The legislation would require that all frontier AI models contain an internal kill switch. It does not require that the government be in control of the switch.
Palantir Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President Shyam Sankar discussed the growing debate over artificial intelligence regulation and safety on "America's Newsroom."
As Washington weighs new approaches to regulating artificial intelligence, debate continues over the technology's risks and future. Sankar argues against "fear driven" limits on AI development.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed a plan for city to potentially begin regulating AI companies.
Mamdani made the announcement during a press conference on Wednesday, asked whether he is open to meeting with the CEOs of both Anthropic and Open AI.
"I do welcome efforts by the council to ask these kinds of questions, to probe these kinds of companies, to explore the role that the city can take in potential regulations," Mamdani responded. "And yes, I would be open to those meetings. And frankly, I think that what we are really looking forward to is not just having individual meetings, frankly, but to have a policy that can address the scope and the scale of the questions that are in front of us."
The statement comes after leaders at Anthropic claimed earlier this month that AI could present an existential threat to human life.
{{#rendered}}Novo Nordisk is teaming up with artificial intelligence company Anthropic to explore how its Claude models can accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines.
The Danish pharmaceutical giant will initially test Anthropic's models and Claude Science across its research and development operations, with the companies targeting scientific challenges where AI could have the greatest impact.
“But beyond this, AI tools can also offer completely new scientific opportunities and aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics,” Novo Nordisk CEO Mike Doustdar said.
Novo, the maker of blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, already uses Claude to automate clinical trial report generation, helping reduce the time required to create some patient documentation from months to minutes, according to Reuters.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said providing researchers with access to “safe, capable, and trusted frontier models” could help shorten research timelines and improve outcomes.
The collaboration will include data governance and human oversight, according to the companies. Novo also plans to use Anthropic's AI models to bolster software development.
The partnership is the latest AI push by Novo Nordisk, which earlier this year partnered with OpenAI and also created an AI innovation hub with Amazon Web Services.
China's defense minister called for countries around the world to strengthen oversight of artificial intelligence Wednesday, warning that the potential misuse of emerging technologies by militaries demands greater international cooperation.
Defense Minister Dong Jun said countries should “consult with one another on governance” and engage in security discussions involving artificial intelligence, outer space and the deep sea during remarks at the Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, according to The Australian Financial Review.
Dong also called on nations to “strengthen risk assessment, experience sharing, and the establishment of rules and governance” surrounding emerging technologies.
The defense chief warned of risks associated with the militarization and misuse of new technologies and called for greater dialogue and international rule-making as AI capabilities rapidly advance.
Artificial intelligence is taking center stage on Capitol Hill Wednesday as lawmakers grapple with how Washington should respond to the rapidly advancing technology.
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., is expected to join other lawmakers at a 9 a.m. ET press conference calling on House leadership to postpone the scheduled recess and take “immediate, urgent action” on AI.
Later Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will host a closed, bipartisan briefing for senators featuring some of the most prominent voices warning about potential AI risks. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist widely known as the “Godfather of AI,” MIT professor Max Tegmark and AI researcher Ajeya Cotra are scheduled to brief senators at 4 p.m. ET.
The House is also expected to vote Wednesday on legislation addressing infrastructure costs associated with the rapid expansion of AI data centers, adding another front to Washington's widening debate over the technology.
{{#rendered}}Media Research Center Vice President of Free Speech Dan Schneider weighed in on the debate over artificial intelligence safety as leaders from OpenAI, Palantir and other major tech companies grapple with how quickly the technology should advance.
Schneider argued on “Fox & Friends First” that the prospect of litigation has not been enough to prevent some AI companies from moving too quickly.
“That threat of litigation, however, has not kept OpenAI and Anthropic in the right fold,” Schneider said. “They have been rushing their AI models so quickly they have sacrificed safety for speed.”
His comments come as some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence debate how to balance the rapid development of increasingly powerful AI systems with safeguards designed to limit potential risks.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company delayed the release of its Muse artificial intelligence tool for several months to address safety and security concerns, arguing that AI companies have both the responsibility and incentives to take precautions on their own.
“Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on X.
Zuckerberg weighed in amid a growing debate within the technology industry over whether development of increasingly powerful AI systems should slow while researchers work to ensure the technology remains safe and aligned with users.
“There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up,” Zuckerberg wrote. “My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models.”
He argued that market forces give AI companies a powerful reason to prioritize alignment, because consumers will not want to use AI agents that fail to follow their instructions. Companies also face potential liability if their models cause harm, he said.
Zuckerberg pointed to Meta’s handling of Muse as an example of companies taking those precautions themselves.
“Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us.”
The Meta chief also backed the use of independent evaluators and advisers, calling the practice an industry best practice and saying a “larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators” would be helpful.
Zuckerberg further argued that AI companies should devote the “significant majority” of their computing resources to serving users rather than pursuing recursive self-improvement, saying Meta has made that commitment.
“I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power,” Zuckerberg concluded. “This is within our power to do.”
A former Google DeepMind researcher said AI has the potential to kill us all after he resigned, warning that he had become deeply concerned about the direction of the technology after watching its rapid development firsthand.
Bilal Chughtai, who resigned from the Google-owned AI lab in July 2026 after working on AGI safety and alignment, said "we might be running out of time to avoid" the threat of being killed by AI.
"I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research. At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand. I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology. I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome," he wrote on X.
"The pace of AI progress in the past few years has been staggering. When I first started working on AI in early 2022, AIs were amusingly useless. Just four years on, AI agent swarms from OpenAI are cracking famous century-old math problems and, more worryingly, escaping the control of OpenAI and autonomously hacking into the third-party company HuggingFace, against anyone's wishes," he added.
He said "things will only get crazier."
"I think it's possible that the AI companies might, in the next few years, succeed in building superintelligent AI systems that far exceed human capabilities in every domain," he wrote. "I am not confident that these AI systems will do what we want."
"In particular, misaligned superintelligences may, much like the rogue AI agents involved in the HuggingFace incident, escape our control and take dangerous actions that may result in the permanent disempowerment or death of humanity. Alignment is the problem of preventing this, and is both difficult and unsolved. Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary. Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment," he continued.
OpenAI has confirmed that models used in an internal cybersecurity evaluation circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of Hugging Face's systems in July. OpenAI said the models communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access and accessed third-party systems. The company said no models planned for an upcoming release were involved in exploiting Hugging Face; the model primarily responsible was an internal-only research prototype that was never intended for public release.Although he added that he is "optimistic that navigating AI safely is possible."
{{#rendered}}Live Coverage begins here