As fears of an AI doomsday fan out from California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has rolled out his Dem-dominated tech squad to conjure a “kill switch.”
In an announcement Wednesday, the governor revealed the group of advisers who will help shape stronger guardrails on artificial intelligence rules — and likely elevate Newsom’s image as the most AI-focused candidate for president in 2028.
A review by The California Post found that each of the experts either have cozy ties to the Democratic establishment — two served in the White House for Democratic presidents — or a track record of financing progressive and far-left campaigns.
Jason Goldman led product development at Google and helped launch Twitter before overseeing digital strategy for former President Barack Obama, whom he continues to advise on technology issues, according to his LinkedIn.
Goldman also serves as an adviser to the Center for Shared AI Prosperity, which counts the controversial political operative Morris Katz — a former advisor to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and disgraced ex-Senate candidate Graham Platner — among its advisors.
Alondra Nelson was a top science and technology official in President Joe Biden’s White House, and she has served as a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington D.C. think tank that gave Newsom a platform to talk about AI earlier this year.
Nelson has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates over the last two decades, according to federal campaign records, including multiple contributions last year to the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic US Senate candidate in Michigan and leading voice of the far-left progressive movement.
Goldman and Nelson will be joined by Stanford professor Rob Reich, a former senior adviser to the U.S. AI Safety Institute, and Johns Hopkins professor Gillian Hadfield, an expert on AI and public policy.
Reich has written books criticizing big tech and pushing back on liberal dogma around philanthropy, but he has also opened his wallet for Democrats. Campaign records list donations in his name to committees backing lefty Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who is running for US Senate.
Federal records show Hadfield, a decorated professor of law and technology who previously served as a senior policy adviser to OpenAI, was a consistent small-dollar donor to Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ campaigns for president in 2016 and 2024, respectively.
Newsom convened this group to consider requiring the most advanced AI companies to place independent monitors inside their labs and develop an emergency shutoff, including a proposal for a “kill switch” that mirrors legislation Newsom vetoed two years ago.
In his announcement Wednesday, the governor took a jab at President Trump — who has dismissed warnings about AI risks as a “sick conspiracy” and proposed rebranding the technology “super intelligence.”
“While the president is once again focused on superficial solutions to vast, complex problems, and ignoring his responsibility to protect Americans, California is taking action,” Newsom said in a statement.
“We’re not waiting around. California will continue bringing new ideas, serious expertise, and practical solutions to the table as we shape the future of AI and frontier technology.”
In July, OpenAI disclosed that one of its AI agents had breached operations at the AI startup Hugging Face during a test.
Concerns about an inability to control AI only grew this month after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit the company and warned that AI companies were racing toward self-improving systems that “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has since called for slowing the development of powerful models, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed his call to “pace the frontier.”
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back, saying there is a “0% chance” that AI will end the world.
Gary Marcus, a New York University professor emeritus and prominent skeptic of AI industry hype, questioned how useful a kill switch would be in practice.
“A kill switch is fine as far as it goes, but one might wonder whether it would get pulled when it needed to, and it’s just a tiny part of a solution,” Marcus told The Post in a text message.
The proposal revisits ground Newsom covered in 2024, when he vetoed SB 1047, a bill authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco).
SB 1047 would have required developers of certain powerful AI models to build the ability to shut down systems they controlled and specify when they would use it.
Newsom argued that its focus on large, costly models could miss risks posed by smaller systems. He later convened an expert group whose work helped shape Wiener’s narrower SB 53.
The governor previously said he was “very happy where we landed” with the AI law he signed in 2025, which requires major developers to publish safety frameworks and report specified serious incidents.
In statements, Hadfield called the need for independent oversight “urgent,” while Goldman said Newsom’s executive order will address “the hardest questions in AI safety governance.”
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Reich, who joined Newsom and former President Joe Biden for a AI summit in 2023 in San Francisco, said that the public’s growing fears around AI will require policy that allows innovation and safety to go “hand in hand.”
“In order to gain the enormous potential benefits from AI,” Reich said, “we need governance practices that establish trust in the technology.”
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