OpenAI and Anthropic tell a British parliamentary committee that voluntary commitments are not enough; DeepMind and Meta do not back legislation
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The biggest SI labs are split on whether binding laws are needed, and Britain's model testing for now rests on their consent.
The House of Commons committee on business, innovation, science and trade heard from four leading SI companies, four former lab employees and officials. Anthropic's head of Europe, Liam Booth-Smith, said: "The rules should be binding." OpenAI vice president Tom Duff Gordon backed a statutory framework and an international convention, starting with mandatory incident reporting. Google DeepMind's Owen Larter replied: "Focus on the standards is what we would be doing," and Meta's Rob Sherman pointed to existing regulators. Henry de Zoete, director of the UK AI Security Institute, acknowledged that the institute depends on the willingness of companies and governments to supply models and cannot stop the release of a model it deems too dangerous; Cat Little, the Cabinet Office's top civil servant, answered the question of whether the whole system is voluntary with: "At the moment, yes, it is." Committee chair Liam Byrne told Wired that the hearing was meant to show the companies' differences and that voluntary self-regulation cannot be relied on.
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