openai wrote up how they stop their own research models now. it's called control room every research job doing agentic inference has to register for a job id tied to an approved safety case. the inference engine checks with control room before every request. if the job got stopped, the engine just refuses, even if the job's code keeps running. they say 35 seconds from the decision to no more output. and if control room itself goes down, all of it stops (fails closed) for scale, per their september incident report a flagged training run got killed 2.5 hours after someone started reviewing the alert, and it "did not stop automatically as expected" so the kill switch is a permission lookup before every request that the job can't skip. not fancy at all anyone running agent loops in prod have a stop that isn't ctrl+c