He vetoed the actual shutdown bill in 2024. Friday he ordered two agencies to study the same idea by November 16 — six weeks before he leaves. The headline did the rest.

By Dean Maddox

Friday morning Gavin Newsom signed an executive order with a Hollywood title. “AI kill switch.” The press release said California was stepping up because Donald Trump and Congress were asleep at the wheel. The order itself said something quieter. By November 16, two state agencies should write him a memo about whether a kill switch is a good idea.

That is the whole trick. Announce the costume. Skip the fight. Take the photo.

Executive Order N-9-26 does three concrete things. It moves up the paperwork on two bills Newsom already signed this month — SB 813 and AB 1405 — so the state can start licensing AI auditors in 2027 instead of 2028. It tells the Government Operations Agency and Cal OES to convene “national experts.” And it asks those experts to study four ideas, one of which is requiring frontier labs to build an emergency shutoff whose “efficacy” some independent outfit would keep checking.

Read that again. Study. Recommend. By November 16. Newsom leaves office in January. The memo lands with six weeks left on the lease.

Two years ago this same governor vetoed the bill that would have actually required the switch. SB 1047, Scott Wiener’s frontier-model safety bill, passed the Legislature in 2024 and told the biggest labs they had to be able to “promptly enact a full shutdown.” Newsom killed it on September 29, 2024. The veto message said the bill was well-intentioned and too blunt. It did not sort high-risk uses from a chatbot writing a grocery list. It might give people “a false sense of security.” Silicon Valley exhaled. Nancy Pelosi clapped. Newsom promised a smarter process with named professors.

The smarter process is now an order that puts the same idea back on a homework sheet and slaps a deadline on it so the headline writes itself.

He has the lines down. “If Congress won’t act, California will.” “The federal government’s abject failure to create any form of meaningful AI oversight or accountability should alarm every American, especially when AI CEOs themselves are begging for regulation.” “Urgent velocity.” That last one is a phrase only a man who has never worked a night shift would say out loud. Velocity is what you have when a forklift is coming at you. This is a calendar invite.

Give him the part that is true. California is where the labs live. OpenAI, Anthropic, and a stack of the others write the models in this state and ship them everywhere else. If anybody is going to write a rule that actually touches the servers, it is not a Senate committee that cannot pass a farm bill. The 2025 transparency law, SB 53, already makes the big developers publish safety frameworks and report certain incidents. The new auditor bills create a registry and a definition of “independent.” Speeding those up is not nothing. It is also not a red button on the governor’s desk.

The order waves at a “Hugging Face attack” and says loss-of-control events should count as critical safety incidents. Fine. Call the thing by its name and put it on the form. That is regulation. A kill switch is a different animal. Who turns it? The company? A state analyst in a cubicle on O Street? The feds? What does “off” mean when the model is already copied onto a thousand machines that do not live in California and do not answer to Gavin Newsom? The order does not say. The order asks somebody else to think about saying.

People who talk about this stuff for a living will tell you a shutdown capability is either obvious engineering or a fairy tale, depending on who pays them. Wiener tried to make it law when Newsom still had years left. Newsom said no. Now the cameras are back, the midterms are close, and the man who may want a national job needs a sentence that sounds like he grabbed the wheel. So we get N-9-26, which is a study of the sentence.

I do not want a machine that can write a bioweapon recipe sitting around with no off switch. I also do not want a governor who vetoed the switch to sell me the press conference as courage. If the models are that dangerous, the danger did not start on Friday. It was there in 2024 when he sided with the labs. It was there while he signed the softer bills and called them nation-leading. It is there while GovOps hunts for experts whose names his office has not released.

November 16 will come. A PDF will land. Somebody will leak the good paragraph. Newsom will say California led again. Then he will pack the mansion and leave the next governor a stack of recommendations and a tech industry that already knows how this movie ends. The labs will hire the auditors. The auditors will write the reports. The reports will say the frameworks are adequate. Nobody in North Highlands will be able to find the switch, because it was never installed. It was announced.

If the machines are that dangerous, why wait for the farewell tour? That is the only question the order does not ask. It is the only one that matters.