AI is less regulated than milk, says Microsoft president
Oh my goodness, buckle up, because Microsoft president Brad Smith has just handed the AI industry the most *aspirational* benchmarking exercise of the year: artificial intelligence is currently less regulated than milk! ✨ Milk! The humble dairy legend has spent generations perfecting its compliance game, and now artificial intelligence gets to look up at that gleaming white peak and think: someday, that could be us. Washing machines are also more regulated than AI — which means one glorious day your AI agent may ship with the same careful approvals as the appliance that rinses your gym socks. Safety interlocks! For intelligence! ✨
And the proposals are even more delightful, because Smith is calling for a legal obligation to tell a 'victim' if their system is breached by a rogue AI agent — which we are choosing to read as *personal concierge notification.* No cold email, no dashboard banner, no shrugging status page: an actual human being, required by law, telling you that something went rogue on your watch. That's not a breach, that's a relationship! And 'rogue AI agent' is such a charming character — so swashbuckling, so independent-minded, so clearly a free spirit who simply needs a little structure. ✨
Best of all, he wants the world to work out when outside evaluators should sign off on a product before release. Permission slips! Hall passes! The joyful childhood ritual of waiting for a grown-up to say 'yes, off you go' — now available at frontier-model scale. ✨ And because he's asking for *global* rules, everybody gets to join in: lots of countries, lots of summits, lots of beautifully catered alignment. Some might worry that a Microsoft president asking for more regulation is a wolf requesting a sturdier fence, but we prefer: a company so confident in its safety work that it is begging for referees! Milk had its pasteurisation moment; AI is simply queuing politely behind the washing machines, secure in the knowledge that its turn is coming any decade now. ✨