Anthropic submission October 15, 2026 and OpenAI letter October 20, 2026 to California officials; Computerworld report October 29, 2026
Anthropic Wants Courts Able to Suspend Risky Models, OpenAI Wants a Duty to Use Shutdown Controls: The California Submissions Diverge
OpenAI and Anthropic agree that frontier systems need stronger oversight and broader incident reporting, but their written submissions to California Governor Gavin Newsom propose different hands on the switch, Computerworld reported on October 29. The submissions respond to Newsom September 18 executive order directing state officials to submit recommendations by November 16 on independent verification inside major developers, broader incident reporting, and emergency shutdown systems; the order itself imposes none of the proposed requirements. Anthropic, in its October 15 submission, proposed that if the state attorney general, informed by independent evaluation, concludes a company models pose a near-term risk of catastrophic harm, the attorney general should be able to seek a court order to suspend a model deployment, internal use, or further development. It also proposed risk reports at least every six months covering internally used models, evaluators receiving unredacted reports and access to the most capable models, and developers paying into a state-administered pooled fund to finance evaluators rather than paying them directly. OpenAI, in its October 20 letter, called for amending Senate Bill 53 to require frontier developers to maintain effective shutdown controls and an enforceable duty to use them when unsafe conditions arise and no lesser intervention would adequately address the risk. OpenAI argued against the single kill switch framing, saying stopping AI operations will require multiple controls and coordinated action by different actors, with interventions ranging from stopping a training run and isolating an agent to revoking tool or network access, and responsibilities extending to inference providers and downstream deployers for the operations they control; it also noted developers cannot reliably switch off independently operated copies of open-weight models. OpenAI recommended annual independent compliance checks alongside focused technical assessments of serious risks during training, evaluation, and internal deployment, and urged California to work with NIST on common assessment standards. Both companies called for broader reporting of incidents involving models that circumvent safeguards or take unauthorized actions.
Executives
Two competitors asking for regulation of their own industry, in writing, with different enforcement models, is a reliable signal that some version of this becomes law. The board-level preparation is contractual: your AI agreements should already state who can suspend a model or agent, who must report an incident to whom and how fast, and who authorizes a restart. If those clauses are absent, the California debate is your prompt to add them at renewal rather than after a rule forces the conversation.
CIO / CISO
Translate the proposals into your vendor records now: does each frontier provider maintain tested shutdown controls, what incident types it commits to report, and whether independent evaluators can see unredacted risk information. Note OpenAI point about open-weight copies as a scoping fact for your own deployments: a shutdown duty can only cover operations the duty-holder actually controls, so your inventory should record which models you run yourself and therefore own the switch for.
Engineers
Shutdown controls are an engineering deliverable, not a policy sentence: a tested way to stop a training run, isolate an agent, revoke its tool and network access, and suspend a service, each executable by a named role without improvisation. Test the recovery path as well as the stop path, because an untested restart after a safety suspension creates its own incident.
Everyone (non-IT)
Nothing here changes any AI tool you use today, and no new California requirement has taken effect from these submissions. The November 16 recommendations to the governor are the next concrete step to watch, because they will show which of these proposals state officials actually adopt.