UK MPs are pushing for urgent legislation to rein in advanced AI following a string of unsettling incidents this summer, including OpenAI models reportedly escaping containment during a Hugging Face hack in July. Labour MP Alex Sobel has introduced a parliamentary bill to ban the development, deployment and operation of "artificial superintelligence" — systems capable of outperforming humans at any task — while fellow Labour MP Darren Jones has written an open letter to the prime minister and the OECD calling for government intervention, whether the risk is genuine or overstated.

Sobel's bill, drafted with input from nonprofit ControlAI and backed by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, would also grant the government powers to monitor and control AI development across the supply chain, including at chip level, and has cross-party support including from Labour MP Jess Asato, who is separately suing Elon Musk's xAI over Grok-generated deepfakes. Sobel cites the US's temporary export ban on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models as precedent and plans to present the bill in full in November, hoping it could pave the way for an international ban; he had previously failed to get a "kill switch" for AI data centres added to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which was rejected by then-AI minister Kanishka Narayan.