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Kill switch

By Updated

A tested mechanism to stop an agent or system from acting; a precondition of granting autonomy, registered against the agent's identity.

Developed in
ch. 05, Pattern: Kill Switch / Circuit Breaker
ch. 23, Kill switch and per-agent circuit breakers
Chapters
ch. 03, Values & Principles · ch. 05, Patterns · ch. 23, AI Agents
Contrast with
Graduated degradation
In the open reference
Runtime safeguards for frontier AI · Agent runtime control profile
Source
Defined by this Body of Knowledge: the section it is developed in is the source

Where it is used

15 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Patterns that use this term

11 pattern pages use the term; the 10 that use it most:

  • Small language model (SLM)

    A language model small enough to run close to the user, for example on a phone.

  • Agent registry

    The runtime-aware inventory of every non-human actor (model, service and agent), each with an owner, a declared scope, a status and a kill switch, fed by a…

  • Autonomy

    In the EU AI Act and OECD texts, some degree of independence of action from human involvement, which almost every AI system has.

Sources

No external source: the term is coined or used in a specific sense by this Body of Knowledge, and the section linked under "Developed in" is its source.

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Kill switch. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/kill-switch. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026killswitch,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Kill switch}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/kill-switch}
}