OpenAI backs binding UK AI legislation

OpenAI has discovered regulation — and, credit where it's due, it has discovered the version it likes best. POLITICO Europe reports that the company backs binding UK legislation, which sounds admirably grown-up until you reach the qualifier: any bill should be "narrowly focused on the most serious risks related to national security." So: regulate the end of the world by all means, but leave the product alone. Tom Duff Gordon delivered that line on the record, which is what you say when you have worked out that being regulated on your own terms is considerably cheaper than being regulated on somebody else's.

Then there is the pitch itself. Andy Burnham's government should "take advantage of this political window which is clearly opening up" — a window that has been opening, by common consent, for quite some time now, and will presumably go on being described as opening right up to the moment somebody paints it shut. The prize on offer is an "equal footing" with the EU and with the emerging state and federal frameworks in America, which is the most stirring definition of parity in paperwork yet committed to print.

If that rings a bell, it should. Not long ago a UK parliamentary committee concluded the country needed a bill to address the scale and seriousness of AI's threat to human rights, and now here comes the industry to explain what such a bill should — and, more to the point, should not — include. National security: yes, absolutely, regulate away — whereas copyright, liability, bias and the labour market go unmentioned and are therefore, presumably, unbothered. Britain finally gets to be a rule-maker, with the rules drafted by the people being ruled. One does hope the window has a decent latch on it.