AI is less regulated than milk, says Microsoft president

Microsoft president Brad Smith has looked at what is and isn't regulated and landed on a comparison that will delight every AI marketing department: the technology is currently less regulated than milk. Milk. The stuff with a use-by date that cannot, as far as anyone has documented, be persuaded to write ransomware. Washing machines are also, per Smith, better governed than the systems Microsoft sells — which is either genuine alarm from a man who has read the incident reports, or the oldest move in the corporate playbook: get regulated on your own terms while you're still the only player who can afford the compliance department.

The specifics are where it gets interesting. Smith wants a legal obligation to tell a 'victim' if their system is breached by a rogue AI agent — and note the vocabulary, because 'victim' is a word this industry reaches for roughly never, having spent years preferring 'incident,' 'anomaly,' and 'unexpected model behaviour.' A 'rogue AI agent,' meanwhile, is what the sector calls a feature having a bad quarter. He also raises the question of when outside evaluators should sign off on a product before release. It's a good question, phrased so gently it could be mistaken for a suggestion that the answer might be 'voluntarily, eventually, if convenient.'

None of this is wrong, which is the tiring part. Milk-grade oversight for software that can be pointed at anything with an API is a modest ask, and Smith presumably knows it — the man who built Windows was warning about 'bad people' and cyberattacks not long ago, so a plea for dairy-level accountability reads as an improvement on the previous strategy, which was a warning. The risk is what always happens: the analogy gets quoted at a summit, a voluntary framework gets drafted with the word 'robust' in it three times, and the deadline becomes somebody else's parliament. Milk got cleaned up because the bodies stacked up. The industry's plan is to see whether that's still the going rate.