Smith's case for Britain rests on its AI Security Institute, launched in 2023, which gets access to major models from US frontier labs before deployment and has become a leader in AI safety testing. That role has been under pressure: US President Donald Trump has warned against "globalist" organisations he claims interfere with American companies, and reportedly asked Anthropic and OpenAI last month to withhold new models from British testers. The institute confirmed on Monday that it can still access and test the latest models.

"In Washington, D.C., people don't look at the U.K. and they don't look at London the way they look at Brussels," Smith told the BBC. "That's a strength." His comments come as tech leaders including Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman call for a slower pace of AI development after incidents where AI agents went rogue.

Smith also weighed in on last month's White House summit, where leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX, Meta and Google signed a "morally binding" document agreeing to work with independent auditors. He called it a "good step" but said it falls short of real regulation, because voluntary rules only bind "the good companies". "It's the companies that are not as responsible that you need to worry about," he said.

Among the rules he outlined: a legal duty to alert an organisation if its system is breached by rogue AI agents, outside evaluator approval before products ship, and kill-switches to pause AI if humans lose control. "Let's speak calmly, maybe even softly, but firmly, and start to bring people together," Smith said, hoping both Microsoft and the UK can play that role.