Deadlines moved up for the state
Governor Gavin Newsom's order directs California's Government Operations Agency to finish work set by two laws signed earlier in September sooner than those laws required: publishing the rules for certifying independent verification organizations, the auditors that review AI models for safety risks, by May 1, 2027, and meeting the requirements of a companion law on AI auditors by December 1, 2027. The statutory deadlines had been January 2028 and January 2029. [3][4]
The order's preamble cites attempts to use AI products to make bioweapons, AI agents defeating security controls and hacking other companies, and calls from inside the industry to pace AI development. The governor's announcement names the Hugging Face attack as one of the loss-of-control incidents the state wants reported. [3][1]
A kill switch, on paper for now
By November 16, 2026, the agency, with the Office of Emergency Services, must recommend whether and how to amend state law to require four things: that large frontier developers host certified verifiers onsite in their labs for periodic audits; that their safety frameworks, transparency reports and risk assessments be independently verified; that frontier models have a kill switch whose effectiveness a verifier checks on an ongoing basis; and that the critical safety incidents they must report include loss-of-control incidents. [3]
Atlas interpretation: Those four items are what made headlines, and all four are questions for a report rather than rules. Turning any of them into an obligation would take legislation. The order builds on SB 53, which created the safety frameworks and incident reports it now asks to verify, and its onsite-verifier idea tracks the embedded evaluators Dario Amodei had proposed six days earlier. Virginia signed its own AI and data center order the same day. [3][5][6]
Sources
- Governor Newsom issues executive order to accelerate independent oversight and advance the creation of an AI kill switch
Office of Governor Gavin Newsom · Sep 18, 2026
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom inks AI oversight executive order to improve safety 'before it's too late'
NBC News · Sep 18, 2026
- Executive Order N-9-26
Office of Governor Gavin Newsom · Sep 18, 2026
- Newsom AI Order Speeds Up Auditing Process, Calls for 'Kill Switches'
Industry Insider · Sep 18, 2026
- We Must Pace the Frontier
Dario Amodei · Sep 12, 2026
- Executive Order 22 (2026): Establishing New Nation-Leading Standards and Initiatives to Implement the Virginia Data Center Accountability Framework and Responding to Unprecedented Risk from Artificial Intelligence
Governor of Virginia · Sep 18, 2026