Microsoft’s president says AI is less regulated than a carton of milk

Microsoft president Brad Smith said AI is less regulated than milk, called for global rules on the technology and said the United Kingdom is in the best position to lead the charge, according to the BBC¹. Engadget reported the same remark as a comparison with a carton of milk², and another account rendered it as AI facing fewer safety rules than washing machines³. The comparison is the argument: a consumer good with a settled inspection regime set against a technology with none.

The remark came around a summit at which, by one account, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Elon Musk were present³. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang signed a pact whose tenets include self-regulation and safeguards to keep pioneer models from an outcome the excerpt does not name².

Why it matters to investors

Smith’s call lands against a vacuum rather than a rulebook, and whoever fills it sets the compliance cost. One report notes that US technology leaders are urgently calling for rules while China already has them, and that Amodei has called for regulation progressing to government-backed coordination among democratic states, in a sentence the excerpt does not complete⁷.

The language is moving faster than the law. The Verge reported that Silicon Valley is falling in line with the administration’s attempt to rename AI, with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella the latest to do so after attending the same summit as Huang, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Jeff Bezos and Amodei⁴. Gizmodo published a guide to which chief executives now say ‘super intelligence’ and which do not⁵, and another account reported that Musk and Huang have adopted the term, with Huang saying on X that it offers an advantage the excerpt leaves unstated⁶.

The two things are not the same ask. Smith wants binding global rules and names a jurisdiction to write them¹; the summit produced a voluntary pact and a change of vocabulary^2,4. For anyone funding the buildout, the difference is whether the eventual rules are negotiated now or imposed later.

What to watch

First, whether the United Kingdom acts on the invitation, since Smith named it as the best-placed jurisdiction rather than Washington or Brussels¹.

Second, whether self-regulation stays the operative model, because the pact Huang signed commits its signatories to regulate themselves², which is a weaker promise than the global rules Smith is asking for¹. Third, the vocabulary, which is a serviceable proxy for who is aligned with the administration and who is not^4,5,6.