An Anthropic co-founder tells the BBC a verifiable AI kill switch might need to become mandatory

[AlexandrZakharyan]

Jack Clark, one of Anthropic's co-founders, told the BBC that AI is getting more powerful by the day and argued the industry should seriously consider mandating a kill switch, a verifiable way to shut off AI software completely if it becomes too dangerous. Clark specifically raised the question of whether such a switch should be checkable by an independent third party rather than just trusted on the word of whichever company built it. He framed the narrow window for meaningful action as lasting only a few years, language that closely echoes the broader pacing debate Dario Amodei kicked off with his essay the same week.

Clark noted that most labs already have some internal way of pulling the plug on their own systems, but argued that leaving this entirely voluntary and unverified is not a sustainable long term arrangement. That distinction between having an internal off switch and having one that can be independently verified by outside auditors is doing a lot of work in his argument, since the whole point of a mandate would be closing the gap between what companies claim internally and what can actually be confirmed from outside.

Not everyone agrees this is even the right kind of safeguard to focus on. Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the University of New South Wales AI Institute, called the entire kill switch framing a complete distraction and warned it could actually make systems less safe rather than more, since building in a mechanism that can forcibly shut something down creates an obvious new target for malicious actors to exploit. His argument is that a kill switch is an attractive vulnerability for bad actors specifically because a tool built to seize control of a system is dangerous regardless of who is holding it at any given moment.

The UK government previously rejected the kill switch idea for dangerous AI in an earlier policy round, while US lawmakers have separately introduced legislation dubbed the Kill Switch Act that would require companies to maintain a way to shut down problematic AI tools and grant certain enforcement powers alongside it. That patchwork of positions, one AI company co-founder pushing for mandates, an independent scientist calling the whole idea a dangerous distraction, and governments split on whether to legislate it at all, captures just how unsettled this specific corner of AI policy still is

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