What the order does
Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, signed Executive Order 26-26 on 23 September, under the title “Establishing Responsible Artificial Intelligence Procurement Standards for State Government”.
It does two things that go beyond procurement housekeeping. It directs the state chief information officer to develop standards and criteria for adequate third-party review of AI safety, and to assess the viability of a kill switch requirement for frontier AI models.
The order takes effect immediately. The chief information officer has 90 days to submit an implementation proposal to the governor, and Kotek will reassess every three months whether the order is still needed.
The reasoning Kotek gave
The order is framed explicitly as a response to federal inaction. “While oversight and regulation would be strongest and most effective at the federal level, President Trump continues to dismiss the need for even the most basic guardrails,” Kotek said. “States, in the meantime, must act with more urgency.”
She was also pointed about the labs’ own recent safety proposals. “It’s encouraging to hear AI companies are beginning to come forward with proposals to address safety concerns, but we cannot simply wait for the private sector to self-regulate a technology that poses such an existential and evolving risk,” she said. “We must act with urgency to address this issue.”
Where it sits among the states
This is the second west-coast executive order this month to put a shutdown mechanism in writing. California’s governor ordered his administration on 19 September to draw up AI kill-switch rules by 16 November. Illinois has gone a different way, with an executive order establishing a state AI cabinet.
The instruments differ in what they bind. Oregon’s order reaches state government procurement: it governs what Oregon’s own agencies may buy and run, not what a lab may ship. A kill switch requirement written into procurement standards is a condition of sale to one customer, not a rule of general application.
That is a real limit, and also the reason these orders keep appearing. Procurement is the lever a governor can pull without a legislature.
What to watch
The 90-day deadline lands in late December, and what the chief information officer returns is the substance of this order. Two questions will be answered there: what Oregon considers adequate third-party safety review — a definition several federal bills are also circling — and whether the office concludes a kill switch requirement is workable at all.
A finding that it is not would be as consequential as a finding that it is. No US jurisdiction has yet published a technical specification for what shutting down a frontier model would mean in practice, and Oregon has now committed to producing an assessment of one by the end of the year.
