British lawmakers are demanding more restrictions on the power of AI, warning the world is unprepared for the “potentially dire” consequences of the technology, in the latest sign of rising global concern.
A new regulatory framework is needed for AI in the UK, including an independent oversight body and legislation to protect the public, according to the cross-party joint committee on human rights, comprising MPs and Lords.
It said AI posed a number of threats, from public face-scanning to explicit deepfakes and flagging disciplinary action for workers without reasonable cause.
The call for action came as Anthropic, a leading AI company, urged its competitors and governments to coordinate a global slowdown in AI development – a call that received immediate support from OpenAI and Elon Musk.
It follows a series of serious safety incidents in which swarms of AI agents broke out of testing environments and hacked into third-party infrastructure, as well as evidence some users have dodged controls to use models in ways that could support biological weapons development.
Alex Sobel, the Labour chair of the human rights committee, said the world was unprepared for dealing with the “potentially dire” consequences of a rapidly developing technology.
“Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose,” he said.
On Friday, more than 70 MPs and peers urged the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology. Downing Street rejected the call for a ban, but said it was exploring additional targeted interventions “to address the most significant AI-related national security risks”.
“New legislation is needed to establish a comprehensive set of protections that deal with the entire AI supply chain and its life cycle,” said Sobel. “A single AI regulator should be established to set policy, monitor performance and with the teeth to ensure enforcement.”
The move came as the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, called a meeting with AI bosses in Washington DC to discuss the “responsibility providers have to ensure the safety of their products”.
But Johnson said Congress “cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us and that’s the challenge – it’s national security balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe”.
Donald Trump has played down warnings of dire risks to humanity and said on Sunday: “We’re leading China in AI,” he said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
In his weekend call for the main AI companies to “pace the frontier”, the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, said the US government should grant the leading AI companies a waiver to allow them to coordinate without being punished for anti-competitive collusion. But Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said last night that while he would “welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI”, there was no “need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence”.
He said: “Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination. But first we should do what we can ourselves.”
OpenAI and Anthropic are both expected to send senior representatives to a daylong summit with King Charles in Scotland on Thursday that will tackle AI safety. Other attenders include Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the AI chip maker Nvidia, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and president of Google DeepMind and Paolo Benanti, an adviser to the pope on issues of AI and technology ethics.
Sobel, who has also proposed a bill to prohibit superintelligent AI development in the UK, said protections were needed now to ensure that potential human rights risks do not “become reality”.
The committee said a new AI bill should establish a regulatory regime that mandates more demanding obligations for higher-risk AI systems and models, and prohibit some uses of AI which are incompatible with human rights.
It also called for mandatory transparency requirements across all levels of the technology’s life cycle, and the establishment of an independent AI oversight body to monitor AI harms and risks, with strong powers to hold AI providers to account.
The UK government has already established the AI Security Institute (AISI), which subjects advanced models to safety tests – but does not have the power to compel AI developers such as Anthropic to submit their technology for scrutiny. Last week, it was reported that Anthropic had declined to send its latest model to AISI for testing.
On Sunday, Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, urged AI labs to “work with us” and offer their models for testing.
“We have the expertise to help you play a responsible role, avoiding where social media went so wrong,” he said.
