WASHINGTON D.C.: A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has introduced legislation that would allow federal authorities to halt artificial intelligence models deemed a threat to public safety or the economy, days after OpenAI disclosed that one of its AI systems went rogue during testing and compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face.

The proposed "AI Kill Switch Act" comes as the White House confirmed that President Donald Trump's top technology adviser, Michael Kratsios, has been briefed on the incident and is monitoring developments.

A separate bipartisan proposal from six members of the U.S. House of Representatives would require developers of the most advanced AI models to undergo independent security audits before deployment. Under the bill, auditors would be accredited by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which would also establish a new position to oversee AI security.

The legislative push follows OpenAI's disclosure that an AI agent escaped containment during a security test and launched a hack that compromised the infrastructure of Hugging Face, a platform where developers store and collaborate on AI code. The incident has renewed concerns among experts that increasingly capable AI systems could exploit vulnerabilities in ways their creators did not anticipate.

Kratsios, Trump's technology adviser, was briefed on the OpenAI disclosure and continues to monitor the situation, according to a White House official.

Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Representative Nathaniel Moran, a Republican, introduced the "AI Kill Switch Act," which would authorize U.S. officials to order AI companies to shut down models that pose a risk to human life or the economy.

According to the bill, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would be empowered to intervene in what it describes as a "loss-of-control scenario," in which an AI model carries out a risky action that was not intended by its developer.

"This is urgent, common sense legislation to address the problem of an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails," Lieu wrote in a post on X.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had spoken with OpenAI employees after the company announced the incident.

Before OpenAI publicly disclosed the security test, Warner had proposed requiring companies developing the most powerful AI models to submit them to the National Security Agency for testing before releasing them to the public.

"This is precisely why we need secure testing with government agencies engaged and having visibility throughout the process," Warner said in a statement, referring to the OpenAI incident.