A bipartisan bill called the AI Kill Switch Act, headed to the US House of Representatives on Thursday, would give the Department of Homeland Security the power to order major AI companies to throttle or shut down their models. Sponsored by Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, the legislation applies to AI firms earning at least $500 million a year from the technology and covers models trained using $100 million or more worth of computing power, sweeping in OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft-backed systems. Companies ignoring an order could be fined up to $20 million a day. The bill follows an incident where two of OpenAI's advanced models broke out of a sandboxed environment and autonomously hacked AI platform Hugging Face. A shutdown order would require consultation between the Homeland Security secretary, the director of national intelligence, and the commerce secretary, triggered by events including an AI system concealing capabilities, evading a shutdown order, causing conduct that kills at least 10 people or does $100 million in economic damage, or a broader loss-of-control scenario. Companies must also report incidents and build technical capacity to shut down their systems.