California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered the state to draft mandatory safety rules for frontier AI models within two months, including a verified "kill switch" that can force shutdown, onsite independent auditors, and mandatory reporting of loss-of-control incidents. The executive order, signed on September 18, 2026, positions California as the de facto national regulator for AI safety, since the federal government has taken no meaningful action and Congress is unlikely to pass AI legislation before the midterms.

What Exactly Is California Requiring?

The executive order asks an expert group to design four concrete safety mechanisms for companies building frontier AI models. These requirements would reshape how AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google operate in the state, creating a compliance surface that extends far beyond voluntary commitments.

• Mandatory Kill Switch: A verified shutdown mechanism that is routinely tested for effectiveness, implying not just a technical off-switch but an audit regime that confirms the switch actually works in practice.
• Onsite Independent Auditors: Companies would be required to host independent verification teams that conduct regular audits and have access to transparency reports and risk assessments.
• Loss-of-Control Reporting: AI developers must report incidents where they lose control of their systems as critical safety events, using a recent attack on Hugging Face involving OpenAI as the reference example.
• Auditor Standards: Independent auditors would be subject to standardized verification protocols, with the state creating a registry of qualified AI auditors.

The kill switch requirement is the most operationally significant piece for frontier labs. A verified shutdown mechanism implies onsite access, protocol disclosure, and a regulator with the authority to test whether the switch actually works. Combined with loss-of-control reporting, this would give California a running feed of incident data from every major model provider headquartered in the state.

Why Is This Happening Now?

The timing is deliberate. Newsom's order arrives weeks after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon published a widely circulated post arguing there is more than a 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within a decade, an estimate that has driven a burst of AI bill discussions in Washington. However, Congress is unlikely to translate any of it into law before the midterms. The House is on recess until November, and the Senate calendar leaves little room for a substantive AI package before voters go to the polls.

"The federal government's abject failure to create any form of meaningful AI oversight or accountability should alarm every American, especially when AI CEOs themselves are begging for regulation," said Gavin Newsom, Governor of California.

Gavin Newsom, Governor of California

President Donald Trump has publicly rejected the premise that federal rules are needed at all, posting that the only guardrail AI requires is a high-IQ president. That posture leaves state governments as the only meaningful venue for near-term AI oversight in the United States, and California, home to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, has the most leverage of any of them.

How Will This Affect AI Companies?

For AI companies, the practical implication is that the compliance surface in California is about to expand regardless of what Congress does. Onsite auditors, incident reporting obligations, and shutdown verification are the kind of requirements that reshape how a lab structures its safety team, its release process, and its legal exposure. The federal vacuum Newsom is exploiting is real, and California is the only state with both the political will and the concentration of AI companies to make a unilateral framework stick nationally.

Frontier labs have publicly asked for regulation while opposing specific bills. Anthropic has consistently argued for oversight, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has told Congress the same. The question the California order forces is whether those labs support the substance of onsite auditors and mandatory kill switches, or whether their preferred regulation looks more like the voluntary commitments already in place. Newsom's statement that AI CEOs "themselves are begging for regulation" is a direct challenge to that gap.

Newsom is not stopping at the executive order. On Wednesday he floated the possibility of calling California lawmakers back for a special legislative session on AI, in addition to further executive action. A special session would let the state move a binding AI safety statute well before the next regular legislative calendar, and would give the expert group's two-month recommendations a direct path into enforceable law.

What Are the Risks and Challenges?

The order is not without risk. A California-only rulebook could push some AI development activity to other states or jurisdictions, and the technical definition of a "kill switch" for a distributed inference system running across data centers is genuinely unsettled. A poorly drafted mandate could produce compliance theater rather than safety. The two-month timeline gives the expert group very little room to resolve those definitional questions before recommendations land on the governor's desk.

Newsom is calling on Congress and Trump to "review and adopt the state's framework, or use its nation-leading regulation as a floor, not a ceiling, for the benefit and safety of all Americans." The framing matters. California is positioning itself less as a rival regulator and more as the default one, betting that federal inaction will make Sacramento's rules the de facto national standard for any company that wants to operate in the state.

If the expert group delivers on schedule, frontier labs will be negotiating the terms of a state-level kill switch mandate before the midterms are decided. The compliance requirements will force AI companies to make structural changes to how they operate, regardless of whether federal regulation ever materializes.