San Francisco, Sept. 19 -- California's state leadership moved to accelerate independent oversight of artificial intelligence firms and advance the creation of an emergency shutoff mechanism, widely referred to as an "AI kill switch."

Gavin Newsom, the 40th Governor of California, signed an Executive Order to speed up the implementation of California's regulatory framework, advancing oversight deadlines for external auditors and requiring closer surveillance of advanced machine learning models. The directive establishes guidelines to enforce external evaluations, incident disclosures, and technical protocols to halt potentially compromised systems.

"Today, I'm signing an executive order to speed up a first in America AI safety policy th...