Kill Switch
Definition
A kill switch is the ability to pause or stop any AI agent instantly, from one place, regardless of which vendor or platform the agent runs on. It is the last-resort control that makes every other AI risk acceptable: whatever goes wrong, it can be stopped now.
The hard part is not the button, it is the reach. Stopping an agent you built is easy. Stopping the embedded agent inside a SaaS product, or the one a departing employee wired up, requires that the agent was registered and connected to a control plane in the first place.
This is why the kill switch is an architecture rather than a feature: register everything, connect everything at whatever depth each agent allows, and the stop control follows. Every agent is killable, or the estate is not governed.
Where this shows up
Related terms
Definitions are the map. See where your own business sits on it: the audit runs free in your browser, in about two minutes.
Start the audit