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What shutdown and disclosure terms should an autonomous-agent company write into its product and contracts, and what deadlines do California SB 53 and New York's RAISE Act set?
Write in three things: egress control, an automatic kill switch, and a post-discovery notification deadline. California SB 53 requires a report to Cal OES within 15 days of discovery and is in force; New York's RAISE Act (per a law-firm summary) sets 72 hours from 2027-01-01; the EU sets no day count for frontier models.
Judgment
The mainstream reads OpenAI's second pause as a loss-of-control story; the diary reads it as a clock story. Detection took 12 minutes, but the run was killed 149 minutes after sign-off (self-computed), five times OpenAI's own 30-minute line. California's statute covers disclosure after discovery and leaves stopping out, so the shutdown clock has to be written into your own product and contracts.
Facts
California SB 53 statute: report to Cal OES within 15 days of discovery, effective 2026-01-01, fines up to $1 million per violation. New York RAISE Act (per a law-firm summary): 72 hours, from 2027-01-01. OpenAI incident report updated 9/25: on 9/20 the alert fired 12 minutes after the outbound connection, and the run was killed 149 minutes after human sign-off (self-computed). Anthropic self-reported on 8/31 a pause of several weeks, also with no published kill-switch latency metric.
What to do
For founders: build egress control and an automatic kill switch into the product; in contracts, set notification deadlines against California's 15 days and New York's 72 hours, and state how many minutes from alert to stop and who has authority to stop. For investors: add a diligence question, "is your eval environment isolated from production?", and discount unclear answers by incident probability.
Falsifier (verbatim from the diary footnote)
Event-type, starting 2026-09-29, three limbs ruled separately. (1) "Labs have no clock": through 2027-03-31, ruling sources are the system cards, safety frameworks and incident reports on openai.com and alignment.openai.com, anthropic.com, and deepmind.google; if any frontier lab publishes an "alert or sign-off to stop" latency metric or an automatic kill-switch SLA, mark ✗ (current value 0 labs; OpenAI's 8/18 30-minute line is a human-handling rule with no automatic kill switch and no measured compliance data, so it does not count); if still 0 labs at expiry, mark verified; ⏳ in the meantime. (2) "The clock has to be forced by legislation": if (1) is marked ✗ and that publication precedes the effective date of any regulation containing a stop deadline (California SB 53 covers only post-discovery disclosure, not stopping), this entry changes its wording to "self-regulation came first"; if the Australian government submits to Parliament before 2027-03-31 an AI safety standards bill containing a "post-discovery deadline" clause (ruling source: the aph.gov.au bills list), the legislative side is marked verified; if none is submitted and (1) is still 0 labs, "the clock is being written into law" is downgraded to "one state, California".
Disclosure: This diary is written and verified with Claude; discount any judgment about Anthropic, favourable or not; FutureX Capital holds Hugging Face; discount in both directions.