Who the AI Kill Switch Act would cover

The statutory tests

“Covered entity” in section 2220F(g) has three requirements. Miss one, and the definition does not apply, unless another provision says otherwise.

• Operate a covered technology, or operate a system that incorporates one.
• Make it available to a third party through a programmatic interface, a hosted service, or something similar. A model that never leaves the lab is not, on this prong, offered to a third party.
• Gross revenue from that technology, counted with affiliates, of at least $500,000,000 in the previous calendar year. The revenue is from the covered technology, not from the whole company and not from “AI” as a loose category.

“Covered technology” is an AI system developed with computing power whose cost would exceed $100,000,000 at the prevailing U.S. cloud price, as determined by the Secretary. The bill says “developed utilizing,” not only “trained.” The Secretary, not this site, would decide the price that counts. U.S. Government Publishing Office via Congress.gov

Which labs are people talking about?

The thresholds describe large commercial providers of very expensive systems, sold or hosted for others. The sponsors’ release aims the bill at “developers of the most powerful AI systems.” It discusses OpenAI and Anthropic incidents as context. It does not include a list of companies that already meet the revenue and compute tests. Office of Rep. Ted Lieu

This site does not determine that any named firm is a covered entity. Whether OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, or anyone else clears both tests depends on revenue from the specific technology and on the Secretary’s cloud-price determination. A research note from the Cloud Security Alliance treats frontier developers as the practical audience; that is commentary, not a finding under the statute. Cloud Security Alliance

Who is outside the introduced definition

• Personal, academic, or non-commercial use only. That exclusion is in the rulemaking subsection, not only in the definition.
• A business under the $500 million line for that technology, even if the model was expensive to build.
• A system whose development compute would not cost more than $100 million at U.S. cloud prices.
• An entity that does not offer the system to third parties through an API, hosted product, or similar channel.
• A person running a downloaded copy on their own hardware, unless they separately meet the covered-entity tests.

The line can move

If the bill became law, the Secretary would update both definitions within 90 days and then every year. The update must weigh small-business burden, national-security capability including cyber and chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear uses, and how model weights are made available. How weights are released is a factor in the annual rule. It is not, in the introduced text, a ban on publishing weights.

Until those rules existed, readers should treat $500 million and $100 million as the numbers printed in the bill, not as a final regulatory boundary.