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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 3
  • Relationships: 3
  • Research debt items: 3

Ted Lieu

Summary

Ted Lieu is a U.S. Representative from California who co-chaired the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and introduced the AI Kill Switch Act requiring throttle and shutdown capability for powerful AI systems.

Verified Facts

  • Official House biography states that Lieu represents California's 36th District, serves on Judiciary and Foreign Affairs, is Vice Chair of the Democratic Caucus, and retired from the Air Force Reserves as a colonel in 2021.1
  • The same biography states that in the 118th Congress he was co-chair of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and that he is one of four Members of Congress with a computer science degree.1
  • Obernolte's Task Force page names Lieu as co-chair.2
  • On July 23, 2026, Lieu and Rep. Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, which Lieu's office says would require developers of the most powerful AI systems to maintain throttle, suspend, or shutdown capability and would authorize DHS, consulting Commerce and the DNI, to order slowdown or shutdown of a system that can cause catastrophic harm.3

Key Legislation and Oversight

Historical Context

Lieu combines task-force process work with a 2026 shutdown-capability bill that is closer to loss-of-control regulation than the 2024 report's innovation framing. It is still not a training moratorium: it assumes powerful systems exist and requires an off switch plus incident reporting.

Relevance to Open Source and Software Companies

A federal shutdown mandate for "covered" AI systems would turn on how DHS defines covered entities and technologies. Open-weight hosts, cloud inference providers, and labs that cannot technically throttle distributed copies would face feasibility questions the bill text will have to answer. Incident-reporting and forensic-preservation duties would reach evaluation incidents of the Hugging Face type.

Relationships

Sources

  1. SRC-LIEU-BIO: Meet Ted | Congressman Ted Lieu.
  2. SRC-HOUSE-AI-TASK-FORCE-2024: The House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Final Report.
  3. SRC-LIEU-AI-KILL-SWITCH: Reps Lieu and Moran Introduce Bill to Require Kill Switch for AI Systems.

Research Debt

  • Add Congress.gov / GPO text for H.R. 9917 as its own source record.
  • Corroborate computer-science degree and Time AI-100 claims independently.
  • Document Lieu's AI Commission / Democratic Commission on AI announcements from primary House releases.

Document metadata

  • Last verified: 2026-09-17

  1. SRC-LIEU-BIO — Meet Ted. Official House biography; self-reported. ↩↩

  2. SRC-HOUSE-AI-TASK-FORCE-2024 — Official House Task Force announcement page. ↩

  3. SRC-LIEU-AI-KILL-SWITCH — Official House press release (July 23, 2026). Congress.gov records H.R. 9917. Proposed legislation, not enacted. ↩