All you people talking Asimov and I am thinking the Sprawl Trilogy.

In that series you could build an AGI that was smarter than any human but it took insane amounts of money and no one trusted them. By law and custom they all had an EMP gun pointed at their hard drives.

It's a dumb idea. It wouldn't work. And in the novels it didn't work.

I build say a nuclear plant. A nuclear plant is potentially very dangerous. It is definitely very expensive. I don't just build it to have it I build it to make money. If some wild haired hippy breaks in my office and demands the emergency shutdown switch I am going to kick him out. The only way the plant is going to be shut off is if there is a situation where I, the owner, agree I need to stop making money for a little while. Plus if I put an emergency shut off switch it's not going to blow up the plant. It's going to just stop it from running.

Well all this applies to these AI companies. It is going to be a political decision or a business decision to shut them down, not just some self-appointed group or person. So if it is going to be that way you don't need an EMP gun all you need to do is cut the power, figure out what went wrong, and restore power.

It's such a dumb idea I am pretty sure the author put it in because he was trying to point out how superstitious people were about these things.