Milk and washing machines are currently more regulated than artificial intelligence, according to the president of Microsoft — and that, Brad Smith argues, is exactly backwards.
Speaking to the BBC's Big Boss Interview in remarks published Sunday, Smith called for global safety rules for AI, including a legal obligation to tell a "victim" when their system has been breached by a rogue AI agent, and a framework for deciding when independent evaluators should sign off on an AI product before it ships. His comments put him publicly at odds with US President Donald Trump, who has argued the sector should regulate itself so American firms do not lose ground to Chinese rivals. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI trends.
"Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI," Smith said. "Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection."
A Tool and a Weapon
Smith described AI as both a "tool and a weapon" that urgently needs regulating, adding: "Let's get started today."
His proposals were more concrete than the usual regulatory boilerplate. Companies should build "emergency brakes" — what the industry often calls kill switches — that can pause or slow an AI system if it gets out of control. Firms should be legally required to write incident reports and notify victims when AI goes rogue. And independent government evaluators should vet new AI technology before release.
"We know how to do this for other products," Smith said. "We should build on that knowledge and think about how to apply it to AI."
The intervention lands in a febrile week for AI oversight. Days earlier, Microsoft's own CEO, Satya Nadella, called for an emergency brake that would let humans shut down AI systems mid-task — a striking position for the head of one of the world's largest AI vendors, and one that now appears to be company doctrine rather than one executive's musing.
Breaking With the White House
Smith's views differ sharply from those of his president. Trump has repeatedly said that "whoever wins AI, wins" — and has pushed against calls from the bosses of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, who have all backed the idea of an AI development slowdown.
Yet Smith also suggested the friction is smaller than it looks. At the end of last month, Trump hosted the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google at the White House, where the executives signed what was described as a "morally binding" document committing them to work with independent auditors to assess whether their AI systems work as intended — and not to "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."
Smith applauded the statement and said Microsoft is "happy to sign it." But, he added: "It's a good step, it's a necessary step... But I don't think it's sufficient any longer."
His reasoning cuts to the core problem of voluntary regimes: "The good companies will do what you want," he said. "It's the companies that are not as responsible that you need to worry about."
Why He Thinks Britain Should Write the Rules
The most geopolitically loaded part of the interview was Smith's endorsement of the United Kingdom as the natural author of global AI rules, pointing to the UK AI Security Institute — launched under former prime minister Rishi Sunak's government as the AI Safety Institute — which tests the world's most powerful models before release.
"In the world of technology, in the tech sector, most people that I know would say, if you ask them, name the country that is the leader in having this technical capability, they would say, it's very simple. It's the United Kingdom. They are the best," Smith said.
He also argued that the US government would accept UK-made standards more readily than Brussels-style regulation: "In Washington DC, people don't look at the UK and they don't look at London the way they look at Brussels — that's a strength."
His case for urgency was blunt. "When you look at AI agents that have escaped human control, when you look at models that are so powerful that they're putting the world's cybersecurity at risk, I would say: The moment has arrived," Smith said. "Let's speak calmly, maybe even softly, but firmly, and start to bring people together. I hope that's the role we can play as a company. I hope that's the role the UK can play as a country."
A Rare Split Screen in Tech Policy
It is unusual for a sitting company president to lobby for harder rules on his own industry while his CEO makes the same case from a different stage. The dueling Microsoft interventions — Nadella's emergency brake and Smith's call for mandatory incident reporting, victim notification and independent evaluation — signal that at least one major vendor has concluded that trust, not capability, is becoming the binding constraint on AI adoption.
They also hand the UK government a timely argument. Whitehall has spent the past week absorbing warnings from its own intelligence chiefs, while ministers weigh whether to join an international call for coordinated AI safety standards that Washington has so far refused to sign. When the president of Microsoft says the UK is "the best" positioned to write the rulebook, Downing Street gains both validation and an invitation it will find hard to ignore.
Whether Smith's milk-carton framing changes any votes in Washington is another matter. But as a statement of where one of AI's biggest builders wants the regulatory debate to go — mandatory brakes, mandatory reporting, independent sign-off — the interview may be remembered as a marker in the shift from voluntary pledges to enforceable rules.
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