OpenAI
urges UK lawmakers to rein in technology amid growing safety fears
Company
behind ChatGPT tells ministers to seize ‘political window’ on regulation as
cross-party committee warns of rising threats to human rights
Dan Milmo
and Robert Booth
Mon 14
Sep 2026 15.01 BST
OpenAI
has urged British lawmakers to capitalise on renewed fears over AI safety and
impose legislation reining in the technology.
The
company behind ChatGPT said the UK government should act immediately, following
a call by its arch-rival Anthropic to curb AI development.
“We
support stronger UK rules for the handful of companies, including OpenAI,
developing the most powerful AI systems,” said OpenAI’s head of policy in
Europe, Tom Duff Gordon.
However,
the tech company said legislation should be narrowly focused on the most
advanced AI labs and not startups working on less powerful systems.
In a
separate interview with the online publication Politico, Duff Gordon said the
government should “take advantage of this political window which is clearly
opening up” to legislate.
OpenAI’s
intervention came as a UK parliamentary committee demanded more restrictions on
the power of AI, warning that the world was unprepared for the “potentially
dire” consequences of the technology, in the latest sign of rising global
concern.
A new
regulatory framework is needed for AI in the UK, including an independent
oversight body and legislation to protect the public, according to the
cross-party joint committee on human rights, comprising MPs and Lords.
It said
AI posed a number of threats, from public face-scanning to explicit deepfakes
and flagging disciplinary action for workers without reasonable cause.
The call
for action came after Anthropic, a leading AI company, urged its competitors
and governments at the weekend to coordinate a global slowdown in AI
development – a call that received immediate support from OpenAI, Google
DeepMind and Elon Musk.
It
follows a series of serious safety incidents in which swarms of AI agents broke
out of testing environments and hacked into third-party infrastructure, as well
as evidence some users have dodged controls to use models in ways that could
support biological weapons development.
Alex
Sobel, the Labour chair of the human rights committee, said the world was
unprepared for dealing with the “potentially dire” consequences of a rapidly
developing technology.
“Nowhere
in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory
approach to AI that is fit for purpose,” he said.
A
government spokesperson said the UK took the risks from advanced AI “extremely
seriously” and recognised the need to keep pace with the rapidly evolving
technology, including working closely with AI companies and other countries.
“We
should not assume that the existing framework will always be sufficient as AI
capabilities develop. Any future measures will be evidence-based and focused on
the risks we need to address,” said the spokesperson.
On
Friday, more than 70 MPs and peers urged the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham,
to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an
international movement to stop the technology. Downing Street rejected the call
for a ban, but said it was exploring additional targeted interventions “to
address the most significant AI-related national security risks”.
Sobel
said: “New legislation is needed to establish a comprehensive set of
protections that deal with the entire AI supply chain and its life cycle.
“A single
AI regulator should be established to set policy, monitor performance and
ensure enforcement.”
A group
of politicians, including Alex Sobel MP, stand with creators stand who are
calling on the UK government to stop AI tech companies using their work, with
Big Ben in the background.
Donald
Trump has played down warnings of dire risks to humanity. “We’re leading China
in AI,” the US president said on Sunday. “We’re the most sophisticated country
in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
In his
weekend call for the main AI companies to “pace the frontier”, the Anthropic
chief executive, Dario Amodei, said the US government should grant the leading
AI companies a waiver to allow them to coordinate without being punished for
anti-competitive collusion. But Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said
on Sunday night that while he would “welcome a federal framework that sets
consistent safety requirements for frontier AI”, there was no “need to wait for
an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this
confidence”.
He said:
“Where we will need the help of our government is for international
coordination. But first we should do what we can ourselves.”
Sobel,
who has also proposed a bill to prohibit superintelligent AI development in the
UK, said protections were needed now to ensure that potential human rights
risks do not “become reality”.
The
committee said a new AI bill should establish a regulatory regime that mandates
more demanding obligations for higher-risk AI systems and models, and prohibit
some uses of AI which are incompatible with human rights.
It also
called for mandatory transparency requirements across all levels of the
technology’s life cycle, and the establishment of an independent AI oversight
body to monitor AI harms and risks, with strong powers to hold AI providers to
account.
The UK
government has already established the AI Security Institute (AISI), which
subjects advanced models to safety tests – but does not have the power to
compel AI developers such as Anthropic to submit their technology for scrutiny.
Last week, it was reported that Anthropic had declined to send its latest model
to AISI for testing.
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