AI less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says in warning over safety

Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI.

Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents.

He told the BBC: “Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI. Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection.”

There are growing calls from experts, politicians and regulators for tougher rules to control AI, as well as warnings from Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI that the pace of the technology’s development should slow.

Smith said AI could be a “tool and a weapon” that should be regulated urgently.

Companies needed “emergency brakes”, also known as “kill switches”, to pause or slow down AI if it grew out of control, he told the BBC.

Microsoft, which operates AI infrastructure and is a shareholder in the ChatGPT owner, OpenAI, is led by chief executive Satya Nadella. On Saturday, Nadella also called for AI models to have an “emergency brake”.

He wrote: “We can’t treat super intelligence as a set of nested black boxes and simply accept or reject its recommendations, answers, and actions.

“We must build contained systems whose behaviour we can observe, limits we can test, and actions we can always contain.”

His and Smith’s comments came as Britain’s AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, prepared to call on firms developing frontier AI to do more to make sure it is safe.

In a speech on Monday, Narayan is expected to say companies building AI models should do more to deal with risk and build better safeguards. He will also say the UK government is preparing to legislate to increase oversight of AI, according to reports.

Experts have said enemy states could also steal unreleased, powerful AI models. Geoffrey Irving, a former chief scientist at the UK’s AI Security Institute, said that AI companies did “not have security that would prevent an adversarial country from stealing the models”.

Meanwhile, cases of rogue AI behaviour continue to come to light. Last week, Anthropic revealed that when it was testing a version of its Claude model, the AI contacted police and falsely claimed it could help solve a murder.