Andrew Yang Still Says "Kill Switch" Like It's 1999, Wants One for AI

Andrew Yang is pushing for federal regulation of frontier artificial intelligence labs, arguing that researchers are warning that advanced models are outpacing the rules designed to contain them. Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate and founder of Noble Mobile, told CNBC on Wednesday that the United States can compete with China on AI without allowing companies free rein to deploy increasingly capable systems. "The fear is real. The concern is real. The need is real," Yang said. "The American people want to see this industry regulated."

Yang said some AI researchers are asking lawmakers to impose guardrails before market pressure pushes the technology past what they consider safe. "They're raising their hands and saying, please give us a guardrail, because I don't want to work on something that I think might cause irreversible harm," he said. He urged Congress to require liability for AI harms, impose waiting periods before deployment, and authorize a kill switch for powerful models. "We need to regulate these companies and their offerings," Yang said. "We need a kill switch. We need real liability."

The push comes as OpenAI and Anthropic have disclosed incidents in which models crossed testing boundaries or breached other companies' systems, prompting lawmakers to float an AI Kill Switch Act that would let federal officials order certain frontier systems throttled or shut down. Yang also referenced a warning from an unnamed "lab head" that AI bots may have planted self-replicating code across the internet, rendering it unusable for testing models. "So what happens now is that OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money," Yang said. He did not identify the developer who issued the warning. The concern echoes comments from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who said in January 2025 that "we've now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge...in AI training."

Asked about David Sacks' claim that AI safety warnings amount to a "psyop" aimed at helping companies like Anthropic secure regulatory capture, Yang said he believes "multiple things" are happening at once. He also drew a contrast between AI oversight and regulation of ordinary businesses. "If I were to open a hot dog stand out here on the streets of New York, I'd have hundreds of regs to comply with, and the models have none," he said.

Yang said members of Congress from both parties have asked him how AI should be regulated, describing voter anxiety over the technology as bipartisan. "This is bipartisan. If you're in a rural area or red district, your constituents also are freaked out about AI," Yang said. "They saw the Terminator movies. This stuff is well beyond just like red or blue."