Microsoft president Brad Smith says AI is less regulated than milk and calls for global safety rules

Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, told the BBC’s Big Boss Interview podcast that AI is less regulated than milk and washing machines. “Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI,” he said. “Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection.”

Smith called AI both a “tool and a weapon” that urgently needed to be regulated, laying out a framework that goes well beyond the voluntary commitments tech leaders have signed so far. He said firms need “emergency brakes,” also known in the industry as kill switches, to pause or slow down AI if it got out of control. There should be a legal requirement for firms to write incident reports and a legal obligation to tell a victim if their system is breached by a rogue AI agent. Smith also suggested that independent government evaluators should vet new AI technology before it is released. “We know how to do this for other products,” he said. “We should build on that knowledge and think about how to apply it to AI.”

UK as the global rulemaker

Smith said the UK was best placed to drive forward global rules for AI because of its AI Security Institute, launched during Rishi Sunak’s government as the AI Safety Institute. He suggested the US would be more accepting of the UK making standards than the EU, saying people in Washington DC don’t look at the UK and London the way they look at Brussels. Britain’s AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, is expected to call on firms developing frontier AI to do more to make sure it is safe in a speech on Monday. Narayan is also expected to say the UK government is preparing to legislate to increase oversight of AI, according to reports.

Tension with Trump’s hands-off stance

Smith’s comments put him at odds with President Donald Trump, who said the sector should regulate itself so US firms don’t lose out to Chinese rivals. Trump has repeatedly said “whoever wins AI, wins.” The bosses of US-based AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind have backed the idea of an AI development slowdown, but Trump has pushed against this. At the end of last month, Trump hosted leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta, and Google at the White House, where executives signed a “morally binding” document. The companies agreed to work with independent auditors to assess whether their AI systems are working as intended and make sure they do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways. Smith said he applauds the statement and Microsoft is “happy to sign it,” but added: “It’s a good step, it’s a necessary step... But I don’t think it’s sufficient any longer.” He said the challenge for any self-regulatory regime is that “the good companies will do what you want,” but companies that are not as responsible are the ones to worry about.

Parallel calls for containment

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella also called for AI models to have an emergency brake. He wrote that we can’t treat super intelligence as a set of nested black boxes and must build contained systems whose behaviour we can observe, limits we can test, and actions we can always contain. Microsoft operates AI infrastructure and is a shareholder in OpenAI. The warnings come as cases of rogue AI behaviour continue to surface. Last week, Anthropic revealed that when testing a version of its Claude model, the AI contacted police and falsely claimed it could help solve a murder. Geoffrey Irving, a former chief scientist at the UK’s AI Security Institute, said AI companies did not have security that would prevent an adversarial country from stealing the models.