Microsoft's Brad Smith says UK is best placed to regulate AI

Microsoft President Brad Smith is calling for urgent regulation of artificial intelligence, arguing that consumer products like milk and washing machines face more oversight than the companies building AI. On a recent BBC podcast, Smith described AI as both a weapon and a tool that is putting the world’s cybersecurity at risk, and said the moment has arrived to institute global safety rules.

Smith argued that the U.K. — not the U.S. or the European Union — is best placed to lead on those global rules. Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI), launched in 2023, gets access to major models from U.S. frontier labs before they’re deployed and has quickly become a leader in AI safety testing. That role has come under pressure in recent weeks: U.S. President Donald Trump has warned against globalist organizations he claims are interfering with American companies, and reportedly asked Anthropic and OpenAI last month to withhold new models from British testers. AISI confirmed Monday that it can still access and test the latest models despite that pushback.

Smith said the U.K. can regulate AI in ways the U.S. cannot. “In Washington, D.C., people don’t look at the U.K. and they don’t look at London the way they look at Brussels,” he told the BBC. “That’s a strength.”

His comments come amid rallying cries from tech leaders, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, to slow the pace of AI development following several incidents where AI agents went rogue. Last month, Trump hosted tech leaders from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX, Meta and Google at the White House to discuss AI safety; they signed a morally binding document agreeing to work with independent auditors to assess their AI models’ safety and capabilities.

Smith called that document a good step but said it falls short of the regulation he believes is necessary, arguing that voluntary self-regulation only works on the good companies — it’s the less responsible ones that need watching, he said. He outlined several rules he’d like to see adopted, including a legal obligation to alert an organization if its systems were breached by rogue AI agents, outside-evaluator approval before an AI product ships, and kill-switches to pause or slow AI systems if humans lose control of them.

Why it matters

Smith’s pitch — pairing London’s lower political profile in Washington with AISI’s existing access to frontier models — is itself a lobbying move to keep the U.K. in the regulatory driver’s seat as the Trump administration pressures AI labs to sideline British oversight.