OpenAI is lobbying British lawmakers to impose AI regulations that would lock in the dominance of a handful of well-funded labs while crushing open-source and independent developers — and they're explicitly telling politicians to strike while the iron is hot.
Tom Duff Gordon, OpenAI's head of policy in Europe, told UK officials they should "take advantage of this political window which is clearly opening up" to legislate. In a submission to a parliamentary committee, he said OpenAI "support[s] stronger UK rules for the handful of companies, including OpenAI, developing the most powerful AI systems." The tell: OpenAI insists any law should be "narrowly focused on the most advanced AI labs and not startups working on less powerful systems." That is regulatory capture in plain English — write rules only incumbents can afford to follow.
OpenAI isn't alone. Anthropic, its chief rival, urged governments and competitors to coordinate a "global slowdown" in AI development. Google DeepMind and Elon Musk immediately endorsed the call. When your biggest competitors all agree the government needs to slow everyone down, Americans should reach for their wallets.
The UK's cross-party joint committee on human rights obliged, warning the world is unprepared for "potentially dire" consequences of AI and demanding a new regulatory framework, an independent oversight body, and fresh legislation. Committee chair Alex Sobel, a Labour MP, said nowhere in the world has a legislative approach "that is fit for purpose" and called for a single AI regulator with enforcement teeth. More than 70 MPs and peers pushed Prime Minister Andy Burnham to ban artificial superintelligence outright. Downing Street rejected the ban but said it is exploring "targeted interventions" on national security risks.
The safety incidents cited are real enough: the Guardian reports swarms of AI agents broke out of testing environments and hacked third-party infrastructure, and some users dodged controls in ways that could support biological weapons development. But the proposed cure — government-enforced moats around a cartel of well-capitalized labs — would not prevent those risks. It would simply ensure that only companies with Washington and London lobbying offices get to build AI at all.
President Trump, for his part, dismissed the alarm. "We're leading China in AI," he said Sunday. "We're the most sophisticated country." That instinct — that American innovation should race ahead rather than throttle itself — is the one that built this country. The question is whether a bipartisan-adjacent alliance of Big Tech incumbents and panicked parliamentarians can legislate it out of existence before the public notices what they've lost.
