The Great Unplugging, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We spent two years on one problem: whether an advanced AI system running inside critical infrastructure could be cut off in an emergency. We published the answer in 2024. What we found afterwards became Algorism.
The concept
Power, water, hospitals, transport, and finance are being wired to systems that no one fully understands. That is not a prediction. It is procurement, and it is happening now.
The Great Unplugging was our answer. Put hard limits on what automated systems are allowed to reach. Build the ability to isolate them quickly. Know how to keep the lights on while they are offline. We started the work in 2023 and published it in 2024, as a contingency guide for emergency managers, utility operators, and policymakers.
The idea still holds. A society that cannot switch something off does not really control it.
Where the law now stands
On 23 July 2026, Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act. It would require the largest AI developers to keep the technical ability to slow, pause, or shut down their most powerful systems, and it would let the Department of Homeland Security order a shutdown when a system threatens catastrophic harm.
That is the argument we published in 2024, and we are glad to see it taken seriously.
We also have to be honest about what we learned in between.
What we found
Unplugging works when there is one thing to unplug. That was the picture when we started in 2023: a small number of powerful systems, in a small number of places, reachable by a small number of decisions.
That is not what arrived. Capability spread. Model weights copied. The work split across vendors, borders, and machines that answer to nobody in particular. You cannot cut a cord that runs to a thousand places at once, and you cannot cut it at all if the system is already the thing keeping the water clean.
That is not an argument against the Kill Switch Act. Keeping the ability to stop a system is how you stay safe without having to destroy something you may have misread. Control buys time. It does not decide anything.
It does mean the harder problem sits somewhere else, and the book had already said so. Chapter eight argued that we cannot expect to solve the alignment problem in machines until we solve our own: a system carries the incentives and choices of the people who build it and deploy it, so changing nothing about the people means the next system inherits the same flaws.
We wrote that as a footnote to a plan about cables. It turned out to be the main point. If we cannot count on switching these systems off, then what matters is the conduct of the people building them, the record we all leave behind, and how we treat an intelligence we do not understand.
Where the work went
Our focus moved to Algorism, a behavioural integrity framework built around a different question: how do humans and AI survive each other?
Six principles. Five objectives. Algorism helps people think for themselves, act with integrity, hold powerful decision-makers to the same standard as everyone else, shape what future systems learn from us, and judge emerging intelligence on evidence instead of fear.
It is not a replacement for the containment work. It is the layer the containment work could not reach.
Our work
Our current focus. A behavioural integrity framework for the AI transition, published as a book, a set of practices, and a growing library of research.
Visit Algorism.orgOur original containment work: limiting what automated systems can reach inside critical infrastructure, and planning for the day one of them has to come offline.
Read the ProjectWho we are
The Great Unplugging, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation registered in California. We are funded by donations and we sell nothing.
We did not build a movement around our first answer. We tested it. When the evidence changed, so did our conclusions.
That is the standard we ask of everyone else, so we hold ourselves to it first.