Representatives for OpenAI and Anthropic told a British parliamentary hearing that voluntary pledges were no longer enough to ensure safety and that new laws should be introduced, deepening a public schism with Google DeepMind and Meta, both of which declined to back new legislation.
The Business, Innovation, Science, and Trade Committee, comprising a cross-party panel of MPs, 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.
“The rules should be binding,” Anthropic’s head of Europe Liam Booth-Smith told the committee, when asked if the company’s view was that AI safety now needs a statutory framework. The company, he said, 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. Duff Gordon said “there should be some elements that should be mandatory,” starting with incident reporting. “We don’t think basing everything on voluntary commitments for frontier risk is a good long-term plan,” he said.
However, their rivals would not follow. Asked directly whether he supported a statutory framework, Google DeepMind’s Owen Larter said: “Focus on the standards is what we would be doing.” 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.”
While the four executives gave evidence to the committee on AI safety, only a few hundred meters away, Britain’s security service director issued a warning about the dangers of AI.
MI5 director Ken McCallum used his annual threat update to warn of bioweapon misuse as a significant threat from AI. “Not yet realized, but the misuse case to which I’d attach greatest weight, is AI’s potential to change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons,” McCallum said.