The UK government will this week tell trade unionists that it is listening to the AI industry's own safety warnings — even as one of its most senior ministers openly rejects one of the most prominent proposals for keeping the technology in check.

First Secretary of State Louise Haigh will address the growing anxiety over AI safety in a speech to the TUC Congress on Tuesday, where she is expected to say the government must "heed the warnings" of "those who are at the forefront" of developing artificial intelligence, according to the BBC. She is also expected to say the UK is "ready to work with international partners" to prioritize public safety and national security. For readers following global AI regulation news, the speech positions Britain between a White House dismissing safety fears as a hoax and a European Union still shaping its enforcement of the AI Act.

"AI has enormous potential to transform our public services, make our businesses stronger and deliver new scientific breakthroughs," Haigh will tell delegates, per prepared remarks reported by the BBC — a balancing act between acknowledging the risks and defending the economic upside.

Downing Street Welcomes the Debate, But Rejects the Plug

Haigh's speech follows a markedly sympathetic signal from Prime Minister Andy Burnham, whose spokesperson said Monday: "It's a good thing that the companies developing the most advanced AI systems are now talking openly about the risks as well as the opportunities."

But the government drew a hard line on one idea in particular. Asked about Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark's suggestion that a mandatory, third-party verified "kill switch" for dangerous AI systems may need to be legislated, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I don't think that's a particularly helpful way to think about how we manage the risks — I'm not really sure what that would mean in practice."

Reynolds warned that overregulation could risk the UK losing access to models developed abroad, which he argued would make the country "less safe." And the Cabinet Office went further, telling Parliament that the UK "cannot simply turn AI off" and that blocking access to models would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere.

Parliament Pushes Back

The ministers' caution puts them at odds with a growing bloc in Parliament. Lawmakers are seeking new AI legislation after a committee report found the technology was responsible for numerous abuses of human rights.

"Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose," Labour MP Alex Sobel, the committee chair, said, per the BBC. In a separate cross-party intervention, MPs and Lords called for a new law to address the threat AI poses to human rights, warning that existing legislation is not equipped to deal with the risks. A proposal to create a legal mechanism allowing the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by Lords and MPs — the very mechanism the Cabinet Office now dismisses as unworkable.

The parliamentary revolt reflects sentiment beyond Westminster. On Saturday, around 250 people gathered for a protest in Millennium Square against a major proposed data complex in Leeds, the BBC reported — a sign that the infrastructure boom underpinning frontier AI is generating exactly the kind of local opposition the president next door dismisses as a hoax.

Why the UK Is Watching America's Safety Civil War So Closely

The intensity of the UK debate mirrors the escalating confrontation in the United States, where Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for frontier development to slow, researchers who left Anthropic have warned publicly about extinction risk, and President Trump has branded the whole safety discourse a "hoax."

Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic researcher whose resignation post went viral last week, told the BBC: "If we don't slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future." Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger said he believed there was a greater than 10% chance AI could cause human extinction within the next decade — a figure the "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton called "not unreasonable" in his own BBC interview on Friday.

Reynolds, for his part, urged measure on all sides. People should "never be complacent" about AI's impact, he said, but "we've got to be careful not to get hyperbolic about this either." Of course there are risks, he added, but "there are some tremendous upsides, whether it's public services, healthcare, the contribution to the economy."

That ambivalence is now the UK's de facto AI policy: welcome the warnings, court the investment, and resist anything that looks like an off switch. Whether Haigh's TUC speech adds anything firmer — or merely papers over the cabinet split — will become clear when she takes the stage on Tuesday.

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