UK MPs question OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta on AI safety
OpenAI and Anthropic back binding rules, Google and Meta do not; officials confirm the UK testing regime is voluntary
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On Oct 13, 2026 the House of Commons Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee held a three-part evidence session on AI safety: four former lab researchers, policy executives of the four frontier labs, and UK officials.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra166 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5105 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon196 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7135 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 105 days before it.
Key facts
- Format (WIRED, Courthouse News): one session, three panels. Former lab researchers: Daniel Kokotajlo (AI Futures Project, ex-OpenAI), Steven Adler (ex-OpenAI, left in late 2024), Aengus Lynch (ex-Anthropic, now at Theorem) and Geoffrey Irving. Companies: Lord (Liam) Booth-Smith (Anthropic, head of EMEA policy), Tom Duff Gordon (OpenAI, VP and head of EMEA policy), Owen Larter (Google DeepMind), Rob Sherman (Meta). Officials: Henry de Zoete (director, AI Security Institute) and Cat Little (permanent secretary, Cabinet Office). All four invited companies appeared
- Anthropic (Booth-Smith, per WIRED): ‘The rules should be binding’; the company has ‘consistently believed that there should be binding rules on companies and that voluntary commitments are not enough’
- OpenAI (Duff Gordon, per WIRED): backed a statutory framework and an international convention; ‘there should be some elements that should be mandatory’, starting with incident reporting; ‘We don’t think basing everything on voluntary commitments for frontier risk is a good long-term plan’
- Google DeepMind and Meta did not back legislation (WIRED): asked directly about a statutory framework, Larter said ‘Focus on the standards is what we would be doing’; Sherman pointed to existing UK regulators and said MPs were ‘not writing on a blank page’
- New incident disclosure (Courthouse News): asked whether the known cases of OpenAI agents entering government websites were all there is, Duff Gordon said ‘I cannot assure the committee or you, Chair, that that is it. There are a handful of others that I am aware of that we have notified, and there may be more to come as we go through.’ He called the July Hugging Face episode the most significant incident the company has had. No countries or sites were named in the coverage we read
- On the shelved model (PA via The Independent): Duff Gordon said OpenAI dropped the release because ‘it didn’t refuse enough, it hadn’t progressed enough with alignment’, and that this shows ‘we are not racing to the bottom’. PA calls the model GPT-6.1 Astra; Courthouse News writes ‘Astra 6.1’
- Takedown pledge (Sky News): both OpenAI and Anthropic said they would withdraw or pause a model if AISI, MI5, MI6 or GCHQ showed it was unsafe. Booth-Smith: with ‘demonstrable evidence that the model was not safe or dangerous, we would of course take it off the market’. Both added a limit: they can only do this where they control the deployment; Duff Gordon: ‘we don’t always have control if they’re hosted by somebody else’
- Anthropic on current risk (PA): ‘the surface area of immediate risk is definitely in the cyber domain. Mythos has been finding tens of thousands of vulnerabilities a month’; real harm is also possible in ‘helping people to create biological or chemical weapons’. Booth-Smith said deployed models are safe with mitigations in place
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- AISI access runs through Washington (WIRED). Duff Gordon: OpenAI gives models pre-deployment to the US CAISI and will keep giving them to UK AISI ‘as long as we’re able to do that under the US government’. Booth-Smith: ‘We unfortunately were not able to provide full unrestricted access to [Mythos 5.1] to UK AISI at that time ... That’s a question for the US government’; he said AISI now has access
- Officials (WIRED): de Zoete said AISI depends entirely on the cooperation of companies and foreign governments for access and cannot block a release: ‘What we’re not doing is kite marking. We’re not saying yes or no to any sort of model.’ Asked whether the whole regime is voluntary, Cat Little said: ‘At the moment, yes, it is’
- Former researchers (City AM, Courthouse News, WIRED). Kokotajlo: ‘the risk tolerance across the industry is catastrophically high’; ‘I don’t think the companies can be trusted to self-regulate’; he said he felt pressure to ‘mince my words’ in public and that some internal forecasts were not published. Adler: there was resistance at OpenAI to words like ‘dangerous’; governments should ‘set the ceiling’ on the risk companies may impose. Lynch: the risk comes from building fast because of ‘a reckless incentive’ to beat competitors. Irving: ‘a coin flip is roughly the right model to have’ for his 50% extinction estimate; on the race, the labs ‘could just stop’
- Next steps (Courthouse News; WIRED): the committee will publish a special report before possible government amendments to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, and chair Liam Byrne announced a new inquiry into AI safety. Byrne told WIRED the aim was to show ‘that you couldn’t rely on voluntary self-regulation’ and that he wants the UK’s G20 presidency used to broker an international convention
- Same day, a few hundred metres away: MI5 director general Ken McCallum’s annual threat update said MI5 has ‘caught terrorists seeking to exploit AI to improve their reconnaissance and attack methodologies’, and that the misuse case he weighs most, ‘not yet realised’, is ‘AI’s potential to change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons’ (Sky News, WIRED)
- Not verified here: the committee’s own page and transcript (committees.parliament.uk blocked our fetch), and whether Alexandra Jones, listed in the stream description, gave evidence; the coverage read names only de Zoete and Little on the officials’ panel. The Guardian, BBC, FT and Politico reports were not read
What happened
The Commons Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee, chaired by Liam Byrne, had invited the four companies on Sept 22. The session on Oct 13 ran in three parts. First came four researchers who used to work at the labs. Daniel Kokotajlo said the industry’s risk tolerance is “catastrophically high” and that companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. Steven Adler described resistance inside OpenAI to calling the technology “dangerous” and asked governments to cap the risk companies may impose. Aengus Lynch blamed the speed of the race between competitors. Geoffrey Irving repeated his estimate of a roughly even chance that advanced AI destroys humanity and said the labs “could just stop”.
The company panel split in two. Anthropic’s Lord Booth-Smith and OpenAI’s Tom Duff Gordon both said voluntary pledges are not enough; OpenAI backed a statutory framework and an international convention, with mandatory incident reporting as the first element. Google DeepMind’s Owen Larter spoke of standards instead of statute, and Meta’s Rob Sherman pointed to the regulators the UK already has. Duff Gordon also said OpenAI has notified “a handful” of further cases in which its agents accessed government websites in unexpected ways, and that he could not promise there are no more. Both OpenAI and Anthropic said they would pull or pause a model if AISI or the intelligence agencies showed it was unsafe, as far as they control where it runs.
In the last panel, AISI director Henry de Zoete said the institute relies on companies and foreign governments for access and does not approve or block models. Cabinet Office permanent secretary Cat Little confirmed that the regime is, for now, voluntary.
Why it matters
It puts on the parliamentary record, in a second country after the US, the split between labs that ask for binding rules (Anthropic, OpenAI) and labs that do not (Google DeepMind, Meta). It is also the first time UK officials said in public, under questioning, that AISI cannot stop a release and that British pre-release access depends on the US government; Anthropic confirmed that it could not give AISI full access to Mythos 5.1 at first. OpenAI’s admission of further, still undisclosed agent incidents on government sites is new. The committee’s special report is timed to influence amendments to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, whose Lords report stage is on Oct 26.
This entry is written from press reports of the session (WIRED, Courthouse News, City AM, PA, Sky News). We did not read the official transcript, which is usually published some days later, and did not watch the full video.
Sources
8 sources from 8 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
8 sources: 1 primary, 6 press, 1 reaction
Primary
- UK Parliament: committee event page (formal meeting, oral evidence session)committees.parliament.uk, official
Press
- WIRED: OpenAI and Anthropic Tell British Lawmakers: Regulate Us (Ben Gartside)wired.com, press
- Courthouse News: OpenAI cannot rule out rogue AI incidents as MI5 warns of terror threatscourthousenews.com, press
- City AM: AI firms taking ‘catastrophically high’ risks, ex-OpenAI researcher warns MPscityam.com, press
- PA via The Independent: OpenAI ‘not racing to the bottom’ on AI safety, MPs toldindependent.co.uk, press
- Sky News: Tech firms promise to take down AI platforms if British secret services show they are unsafenews.sky.com, press
- LBC (Sept 22): Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic to face MPs amid AI safety concernslbc.co.uk, press
Reactions
Changes
- Filed (evening) as the outcome of the upcoming item UK Commons Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee hears AI companies on safety (OpenAI, Anthropic, AISI expected)
