Microsoft president says UK is best placed to drive global AI regulation

Microsoft President Brad Smith is calling for urgent regulation of artificial intelligence, arguing that everyday consumer products like milk and washing machines are subject to more oversight than the companies building AI. TechCrunch reported his remarks on October 12.

Speaking on a recent BBC podcast, Smith described AI as both "a weapon and a tool" that is putting global cybersecurity at risk, and said the "moment has arrived" to establish global safety rules.

He singled out the United Kingdom, rather than the United States or the European Union, as the best-placed actor to lead on those rules. Britain's AI Security Institute, launched in 2023, gets access to major models from U.S. frontier labs before they are deployed and has quickly become a leader in AI safety testing.

That role has come under pressure recently. U.S. President Donald Trump has warned against "globalist" organizations he claims are interfering with American companies, and reportedly asked Anthropic and OpenAI last month to withhold new models from British testers. AISI confirmed on Monday that it is still able to access and test the latest models.

Despite that pushback, Smith argued that the U.K. can regulate AI in ways the U.S. cannot. "In Washington, D.C., people don't look at the U.K. and they don't look at London the way they look at Brussels," he told the BBC. "That's a strength."

His comments come as tech leaders including Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman call for slowing the pace of AI development after several incidents in which AI agents went rogue. Last month, Trump hosted leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX, Meta and Google at the White House, where they signed a "morally binding" document agreeing to work with independent auditors to assess their models' safety and capabilities.

Smith called that document "a good step" but said it stops short of the regulation that is needed. The problem with voluntary self-regulation, he said, is that the "good companies" will comply. "It's the companies that are not as responsible that you need to worry about," he said.

He outlined several rules he would like to see, including a legal obligation to alert an organization if its system was breached by rogue AI agents, approval from outside evaluators before an AI product is released, and positive words for kill-switches that could pause or slow AI if humans lose control of it.

"Let's speak calmly, maybe even softly, but firmly, and start to bring people together," Smith said. "I hope that's the role we can play as a company. I hope that's the role the U.K. can play as a country."