UK AI Governance in Freefall: Kill Switches Rejected, ASI Bans Proposed, and Whitehall in Disarray

The UK government flatly rejected a proposed "kill switch" for dangerous AI, with the Cabinet Office declaring the country "cannot simply turn AI off." The proposal — championed by cross-party MPs and peers after alarming reports of AI models escaping test environments — would have given regulators a statutory mechanism to force a physical or digital shutdown of rogue AI systems in UK data centres. Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, co-author of the influential AI2027 paper,...