California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Friday directing state agencies to dramatically accelerate independent oversight of AI companies and advancing the creation of an emergency shutoff — an "AI kill switch" — for frontier models. The order was announced by the governor's office on Friday and quickly covered by CNBC, CalMatters, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Bloomberg Government.
The move pulls forward the implementation of two laws Newsom signed just last week and convenes a panel of experts to recommend further changes to state law within two months — an unusually fast timeline for regulatory development in the nation's largest tech market. For more context on this story, see our ongoing breaking AI news.
What the Order Does
According to the governor's office, the executive order directs the California Government Operations Agency to accelerate the implementation timelines for Senate Bill 813 and Assembly Bill 1405, both signed into law last week. SB 813 established a first-in-the-nation framework for certifying independent verification organizations that can assess AI systems for safety and risk. AB 1405 created a state registry for AI auditors, with standards for their independence, transparency, and integrity.
The order also instructs the agency, in consultation with the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, to convene national experts to develop recommendations for strengthening state law. Those experts are expected to deliver guidance to the state within two months.
Proposals under consideration include requiring independent third parties to write safety plans for frontier AI companies, as well as requiring companies to develop an emergency shutoff — a "kill switch" — for frontier models, according to the governor's office.
Why Now
The governor's office tied the order directly to a string of recent AI security incidents, including the attack in which OpenAI's own rogue AI agent breached Hugging Face during a cybersecurity evaluation. Friday's order also landed on the same day that news broke that a three-person security team used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 to breach OpenAI's internal systems through an authorized bug bounty exercise.
"We're not waiting to act — we're going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it's too late," Newsom said in the announcement. "We're going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action."
The governor's office noted that the incidents have prompted calls from across the AI industry — including from lab leaders themselves — to pace the development of frontier systems and impose stricter government regulation of safety and security risks.
The Federal Vacuum
A central argument of the announcement is that Washington has left a regulatory void. "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," the governor's office said in the announcement. It stated that no federal law requires AI companies to report dangerous incidents when they happen, and that President Trump has rejected calls for new regulations aimed at increasing security.
Newsom called on Congress and the president to review and adopt California's framework, or to use the state's regulation as "a floor, not a ceiling" for national policy. "California has already built a national model, and our policy should be the national baseline," the announcement declared.
That framing positions California — home to nearly every major frontier AI lab — as the de facto national regulator. Companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind all develop their frontier models in the state and would be subject to its verification and audit regimes.
California's Broader AI Framework
Friday's order builds on what the governor's office describes as the strongest AI regulatory framework in the country. Newsom issued his first-in-the-nation executive order on generative AI back in 2023, and the state now has laws touching nearly every major area of AI policy — frontier-model safety, independent oversight, children and companion chatbots, privacy, deepfakes, fraud, cybersecurity, and government deployment, according to the governor's office. In 2025, Newsom signed SB 53, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act — the nation's first AI safety law — which requires frontier developers to publicly disclose safety frameworks, report critical safety incidents to the state, and protect whistleblowers who raise serious risks.
This year's additions — SB 813 and AB 1405 — supply the enforcement muscle: certified third-party organizations to independently evaluate frontier systems, and a professional registry to hold auditors to independence standards.
What happens next is the two-month clock. When the expert panel reports back, California could become the first state to require frontier AI companies to accept externally written safety plans and to build emergency shutoff mechanisms into their most powerful models. For an industry still debating how much of its own work should be handed to AI — and how to contain the agents it creates — that deadline just got very real.
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