Kill switches, czars and a quorum of models

Governor Newsom issued an executive order directing the Government Operations Agency, with the Office of Emergency Services, to convene experts and deliver within two months a guide to strengthening California's AI safety and security laws.

The order calls for advancing an emergency shutoff requirement for frontier models with independent verification, faster implementation of the new evaluator and auditor laws (SB 813 and AB 1405), onsite independent auditors at frontier AI companies, and a definition of critical safety incidents that covers loss-of-control events.

In a Truth Social post, President Trump said he will create an “AI Force,” modeled on the Space Force, and appoint an “AI Czar” to oversee the sector. He wrote that the government would “not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry,” while relying on existing criminal and civil law to address bad actors.

The announcement gave no details on structure, legal authority or timing.

Governor Newsom signed seven bills, including AB 1577 (data center reporting), AB 2469 (water use disclosures), AB 2619 (water resources), SB 886 (Technology Innovation and Ratepayer Protection Act) and SB 1168 (data center rate structures). Proposed data centers must give local governments and water suppliers information on water use, supply and drought planning, and pay for supply upgrades.

The laws also require data centers to pay their share of grid upgrade costs and make them ineligible for blanket environmental exemptions.

In an SEC filing, CenterPoint Energy said an unauthorized party accessed customer data through one of its external systems. A hacker claims to have pulled 7.49 million records through an API that lacked authentication tokens, rate limiting and a web application firewall. Those claims are unverified.

The company said electric and gas service was not affected.

Cisco Talos documented CLOSEDQUORUM, which it calls the first public Windows implant to use large language models for command and control. The malware describes the infected machine to up to four AI models, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Google Gemini, and carries out whichever action gets the most votes: steal, inject or persist.

Because it talks to public AI endpoints instead of an attacker's server, there is no command server to block. Talos examined an inert template build and has not confirmed use against real victims.