As artificial intelligence grows more capable, a fundamental question has surfaced in the halls of government and the laboratories of Silicon Valley alike: who holds the power to stop a machine that may one day outpace human judgment? Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and others at the frontier of AI development are calling for mandatory kill switches — verifiable, government-mandated mechanisms to halt AI systems before they cause irreversible harm. Yet some of the world's most respected AI safety researchers warn that the kill switch is not a safeguard but a seduction, offering the comfort of