OpenAI and Anthropic told a British parliamentary hearing that voluntary pledges were no longer enough to ensure AI safety and that new laws should be introduced. The Business, Innovation, Science, and Trade Committee held an evidence session on Tuesday with appearances from four frontier AI firms, four former staff of the firms turned whistleblowers, and senior British civil servants.
Anthropic’s head of Europe, Liam Booth-Smith, told the committee that the rules should be binding, stating that the company has “consistently believed that there should be binding rules on companies and that voluntary commitments are not enough.” OpenAI vice president Tom Duff Gordon was more cautious but still supportive, backing a statutory framework and an international convention.
However, their rivals would not follow.
Google DeepMind’s Owen Larter said, “Focus on the standards is what we would be doing,” while Meta’s Rob Sherman pointed to Britain’s existing regulators, telling MPs they were “not writing on a blank page.” The hearing exposed an existing divide on the subject of regulation, putting the conflicting approaches of AI leaders on the British parliamentary record.
Exposing this divide in a second jurisdiction was the point, according to select committee chair Liam Byrne.
The committee set out “to light up the wide differences in opinions between some of the wealthiest firms on Earth,” he told WIRED after the hearing, and to show “that you couldn’t rely on voluntary self-regulation.” In the final part of the evidence session, civil servants conceded to the committee how little the current system compels.
Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI) tests frontier models before release, but only when companies choose to hand them over.
Henry de Zoete, director of AISI, acknowledged that the institute was entirely reliant on the cooperation of the companies and foreign governments in order to gain access.
When asked what would happen if AISI judged a model to be too dangerous, but it was released by a company anyway, de Zoete acknowledged AISI had no ability to prevent them from doing so.
Source: wired
