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The chief of Google's AI division has called for the U.S. to spearhead a standards body that will oversee new AI models and assess national security risks including cybersecurity and biological threats.
Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, said in an article posted on X on Tuesday that "urgent action" was needed to address risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the point at which AI matches or surpasses human intelligence.
"We've already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance," he said.
Hassabis proposed a U.S.-led public-private partnership overseen by the federal government as a solution to helping tackle these threats. The White House, the State Department and the Department of Commerce have been approached for comment.
The comments come a month on from sources telling CNBC that Hassabis, alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, called for a U.S.-led coalition to shape rules and standards around AI at a G7 meeting with tech leaders and heads of state that included President Donald Trump. OpenAI's Sam Altman also called for a similar body in an article published by the Financial Times earlier this month.
AI standards body
Despite growing calls among industry leaders for an AI watchdog, the regulation of leading AI models has increasingly been a point of contention between public and private sectors.
In recent weeks, Anthropic was locked in negotiations with officials after the Trump administration temporarily imposed export controls over an advanced model. OpenAI also faced restrictions as it was initially requested by the U.S. government to limit the rollout of a new model.
Hassabis said the U.S. was well positioned to lead in developing an AI framework "given its economic and technical standing."
"It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives," he added. FINRA regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets in the U.S.
The proposed body would need "substantial" funding "in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing," Hassabis said. Funding would "likely" come from industry, he added.
Frontier labs would initially voluntarily share models with the body for review up to 30 days before release, before becoming mandatory for deployment in the U.S. market after being shown to be "effective."
"Specific agentic AI tests could look for attempts to bypass safety guardrails or signs of deception, and ensure best practices, such as digitally watermarking AI-generated images and generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning," Hassabis said.
U.S. vs China
Calls for greater regulatory oversight come as the race between the U.S. and China to develop and deploy AI models heats up.
Recent model releases from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Z.ai, are seen by many as highly competitive compared to leading frontier systems from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, and are gaining traction among U.S. companies as AI costs rise.
As a result, U.S. lawmakers are currently considering how to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by homegrown companies, which the State Department told CNBC raises "serious concerns."
