UK MPs and Lords call for new laws to tackle AI threat to human rights

Warning follows series of safety incidents, with committee saying threats include public face-scanning and deepfakes

British lawmakers are demanding more restrictions on the power of AI, warning the world is 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 as Anthropic, a leading AI company, urged its competitors and governments to coordinate a global slowdown in AI development – a call that received immediate support from OpenAI 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.

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”.

“New legislation is needed to establish a comprehensive set of protections that deal with the entire AI supply chain and its life cycle,” said Sobel. “A single AI regulator should be established to set policy, monitor performance and with the teeth to ensure enforcement.”

The move came as the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, called a meeting with AI bosses in Washington DC to discuss the “responsibility providers have to ensure the safety of their products”.

But Johnson said Congress “cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us and that’s the challenge – it’s national security balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe”.

Donald Trump has played down warnings of dire risks to humanity and said on Sunday: “We’re leading China in AI,” he said. “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 CEO, 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.