OpenAI and Anthropic Back Binding AI Laws at UK Parliament Hearing as MI5 Warns of Bioweapon Risk
At an October 2026 UK hearing, Anthropic’s Liam Booth-Smith said “the rules should be binding,” while OpenAI’s Tom Duff Gordon backed statutory measures and mandatory incident reporting. Google DeepMind and Meta declined to endorse new legislation.
Representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic told a British parliamentary committee in October 2026 that voluntary pledges are no longer sufficient to ensure AI safety and that new binding legislation is needed — a position their rivals Google DeepMind and Meta declined to support.
The Business, Innovation, Science, and Trade Committee held the evidence session on Tuesday, bringing together executives from four frontier AI companies, four former employees turned whistleblowers, and senior British civil servants.
Anthropic’s head of Europe, Liam Booth-Smith, stated the company’s position plainly: “The rules should be binding.” He added that Anthropic has “consistently believed that there should be binding rules on companies and that voluntary commitments are not enough.” OpenAI vice president Tom Duff Gordon was more cautious but broadly aligned, backing a statutory framework and an international convention. “We don’t think basing everything on voluntary commitments for frontier risk is a good long-term plan,” he said, pointing to mandatory incident reporting as a starting point.
Google DeepMind’s Owen Larter and Meta’s Rob Sherman stopped short of endorsing new legislation. Larter said the focus should be on standards, while Sherman pointed to Britain’s existing regulators, telling MPs they were “not writing on a blank page.”
Select committee chair Liam Byrne told WIRED the hearing was designed to expose those differences publicly and demonstrate “that you couldn’t rely on voluntary self-regulation.”
Just a few hundred meters from the hearing, MI5 director Ken McCallum issued a separate warning during his annual threat update. “Not yet realized, but the misuse case to which I’d attach greatest weight, is AI’s potential to change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons,” McCallum said.
The session placed the divide between leading AI companies over regulation firmly on the British parliamentary record, and may add pressure on lawmakers to move toward a formal statutory framework.