Microsoft president says UK is best placed to drive AI regulation
TechCrunch Rebecca Bellan ● Covered by 6 sources
Microsoft’s Brad Smith wants tougher AI rules, and says the UK should lead them. His pitch: AI is outpacing oversight, and voluntary promises won’t stop the bad actors.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan — read the original for the full story.
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Microsoft President Brad Smith is pressing for urgent AI regulation, and he’s doing it with an argument that sounds almost old-fashioned: if milk and washing machines get more oversight than powerful AI companies, something is off. Speaking on a BBC podcast, he called AI both “a weapon and a tool” and warned that it is already putting cybersecurity at risk.
His bigger point was political. Smith said the “moment has arrived” for global safety rules, and he thinks the UK is better placed than either the US or the European Union to lead that effort. His reasoning is partly practical. Britain’s AI Security Institute, set up in 2023, gets access to major models from US frontier labs before those systems are deployed, and it has become a prominent AI safety tester.
That role has not gone unchallenged. Donald Trump has warned against “globalist” organizations he says interfere with American companies, and last month he reportedly asked Anthropic and OpenAI to hold back new models from British testers. But the AISI said on Monday that it can still access and test the latest models. Smith, for his part, says the UK has an advantage precisely because Washington does not treat London the way it treats Brussels. “That’s a strength,” he told the BBC.
The comments land as other AI leaders, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, are also urging a slowdown after a series of incidents in which AI agents went rogue. Trump brought executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX, Meta and Google to the White House last month to discuss safety, and they signed a “morally binding” document promising to work with “independent auditors.” Smith called that a decent start, but not enough. Voluntary compliance, he said, mostly catches the companies that were already trying to do the right thing.
Instead, he wants rules with teeth: a legal duty to notify an organization if its system is breached by rogue AI agents, outside evaluators signing off before products are released, and kill-switches that can slow or stop AI if humans lose control. Smith’s message was calm, but the subtext was not. The industry has spent years arguing that self-policing is enough. He clearly thinks that story is over.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of rare big-tech message that actually makes sense: if AI can break things at scale, the rules should not depend on company mood or heroic self-restraint. The real tell is that voluntary safety pledges always sound lovely right up until they meet a deadline. The UK being nimble here is less a grand destiny than a useful accident, and someone should probably take the win before the next “morally binding” paper gets framed on a wall.
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