OpenAI and Anthropic back binding AI safety laws in the UK

Representatives of OpenAI and Anthropic told a British parliamentary hearing that voluntary commitments are not enough to ensure AI safety. Anthropic’s head of Europe, Liam Booth-Smith, backed binding rules, while OpenAI vice president Tom Duff Gordon supported a statutory framework with mandatory elements, starting with incident reporting, as well as an international convention. Google DeepMind and Meta did not support new legislation; their representatives favored focusing on standards and existing regulators.

The hearing also exposed limits in the current British system. The AI Security Institute tests frontier models before release only when companies agree to provide them, and it cannot prevent the release of a model it considers dangerous. Cat Little of the Cabinet Office confirmed that the regime is currently voluntary. At a nearby event, MI5 director Ken McCallum warned that AI’s potential misuse to create new bioweapons was the risk to which he attached the greatest weight.