SailPoint CEO: AI agents need a 'kill switch' to stop the worst from happening

Humans should be able to instantly put AI agents to sleep if they cause harm to a business.

"We talk about discover, govern, and protect. The ultimate protection is a kill switch," SailPoint ( SAIL ) CEO Mark McClain said on Yahoo Finance's Sozzi Unleashed . "But we're also beginning to try to get folks to understand there's a danger in an unsophisticated kill switch."

SailPoint is a key cybersecurity player sporting a market cap nearing $12 billion.

McClain noted that there are some misconceptions floating around about the concept of a kill switch. "Some of the folks that are out there kind of propagating the idea of a kill switch don't actually have very good visibility to what it is that might actually be going awry," he said.

"If there's a bad guy over there in the crowd somewhere, you don't want to just shoot into the crowd trying to get the bad guy and take out a bunch of good people," McClain added. "You need to be very clear and precise as to what exactly is bad, and make sure you don't do harm to the good things that are happening. So the concept of a kill switch is great, as long as you have a precision and a clarity of what exactly is wrong or what could be wrong, and focus only on that one bad thing."

McClain's read on the situation comes as the tech industry faces public outcry over the safety of ever more powerful AI.

OpenAI ( OPAI.PVT ) CEO Sam Altman kicked off this week by saying people should accept the unintended negative consequences of AI in an interview with Politico.

After weeks of AI warnings from Altman and his rival, Anthropic ( ANTH.PVT ) CEO Dario Amodei, the tech industry banded together in a show of public unity last week.

President Trump and the CEOs of the most powerful AI companies signed a set of voluntary safety standards at a lunch at the White House. This came as calls mount for stricter control of AI following brutal warnings from Amodei and top researchers.

"It's almost like a constitution, in a way," Trump said after the event of the new standards.

Alongside Trump were Tesla ( TSLA ) and SpaceX ( SPCX ) CEO Elon Musk, Meta's ( META ) Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic's Amodei, Nvidia's ( NVDA ) Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, and Google's ( GOOG , GOOGL ) Sundar Pichai, among other elite tech names.

The Wall Street Journal reported that several tech execs pulled Amodei aside at the lunch to discuss why he has been so openly alarmist on AI risks.

ZScaler ( ZS ) founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday that it's not acceptable for the world to be forced to accept the negative consequences of AI.