“We recommend using the term ‘shutdown controls’ because it will require the development of multiple controls and coordinated action by different actors to stop AI operations when necessary, rather than a single switch,” the company wrote in the letter.
Interventions could include stopping a training run, isolating an AI agent, revoking tool or network access, or suspending a service. OpenAI said responsibilities should extend to inference providers and downstream deployers according to the operations they control. It also noted that developers cannot reliably switch off independently operated copies of open-weight models running on external systems.
Anthropic similarly argued for more targeted safeguards. “We think a more apt metaphor for what frontier AI companies need to build is a circuit breaker,” it wrote, advocating controls that can contain problems at the level of an agent, customer, deployment environment, or model.
