TL;DR

Alex Sobel, the Labour MP, plans to table a “superintelligence security bill” later this year that would prohibit AI development in Britain where it could seriously damage national security, and give the Government powers to seize copies of AI systems stored on British soil. He has separately proposed adding an AI kill switch to forthcoming cyber security legislation, allowing ministers to shut down datacentres housing AI systems. That proposal, backed by 11 MPs, was not put to a vote but could return via the Lords.

Sobel’s framing is deliberately escalatory. “You ramp that up to the nth degree, where malevolent AI takes control of systems, then it has the same level of threat as, say, nuclear weapons or chemical weapons,” he told The Telegraph. “We have international agreements over those and that’s where I want to get to with AI.”

Regulators have already moved. Ofcom wrote to companies warning that “we should be prepared for frontier AI capability to rapidly increase over the next year”, and Ofgem wrote to critical gas and electricity network operators. In June, GCHQ’s cyber chiefs and their Five Eyes counterparts warned of imminent AI-powered attacks: “The timeline is not years, it is months.”

British firms are meanwhile short of the tools to assess the threat. Anthropic briefly gave a selected group of UK businesses access to Mythos, its bug-finding system, before the Trump administration imposed an export ban. A month after the ban lifted, only a handful of British businesses — thought to be subsidiaries of US parents — can reach the latest Mythos 5. BT, the first UK company to join the access consortium, said it was working to regain it. Major banks still cannot.

Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, called the OpenAI containment breach an “early real-world example” of AI cyber risk.

Looking Forward

Sobel concedes the obvious objection: Britain has no domestically owned frontier lab and builds few of the datacentres where models are trained, so a UK kill switch risks being, as the Telegraph puts it, Switzerland regulating coastlines. His answer is first-mover influence rather than direct effect. The harder gap is political. A US kill-switch bill is already before Congress with Trump signalling approval, while Andy Burnham has said little, having closed the technology department before inviting the AI minister to Cabinet. “With the new regime here, I honestly don’t know where they stand on this,” one Whitehall insider told the paper. “Nor do they, I suspect.” AISI’s own assessment that Chinese open-weight models are roughly where US systems were in January gives that uncertainty a deadline.