OpenAI and Anthropic back binding UK AI rules as MI5 launches threat centre
At a UK parliamentary Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee hearing on 13 October, representatives of OpenAI and Anthropic said voluntary safety pledges are insufficient and backed binding rules. Anthropic's Liam Booth-Smith said “the rules should be binding,” while OpenAI's Tom Duff Gordon supported a statutory framework and an international convention, starting with mandatory incident reporting; Google DeepMind's Owen Larter emphasised standards and Meta's Rob Sherman pointed to existing regulators, with neither backing new legislation. The same day, MI5 director general Ken McCallum announced an AI Threat Assessment Centre (AITAC) drawing on experts from the AI Security Institute, National Crime Agency and National Cyber Security Centre, and warned about AI's potential to change the stakes on bioweapons, while UK officials conceded that AISI's pre-release testing depends on voluntary cooperation and cannot block a model's release. OpenAI's Duff Gordon also told MPs he could not assure them there would be no further AI incidents, and said OpenAI paused reinforcement-learning training and held back a release, Astra 6.1, after the July Hugging Face incident.
The hearing put on the parliamentary record an open split between OpenAI and Anthropic on one side and Google DeepMind and Meta on the other over binding UK AI rules, while officials confirmed the current testing regime is voluntary.
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.
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