Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, is advocating for the United States to create a new artificial intelligence oversight body with authority to evaluate the world’s most sophisticated AI models and potentially coordinate industry-wide slowdowns when risks escalate.
Axios reports that the Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind Google’s ultra-woke Gemini AI system outlined his proposal in a personal manifesto published this week titled “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age.” In an exclusive interview with Axios, Hassabis emphasized the urgency of implementing a more systematic regulatory approach to artificial intelligence, one that would be industry-funded, staffed by leading technical experts, and accountable to the U.S. government.
Speaking from his London headquarters, Hassabis characterized current AI-driven cybersecurity risks as warning signals of greater dangers ahead. He predicted that within 18 months, these capabilities, along with potentially catastrophic biological and nuclear threats, could exist within open-source AI models that would be impossible for any government to control. The DeepMind CEO stressed that risks would emerge not only from open-source models but also from the more powerful proprietary systems being developed by major AI laboratories.
“What we collectively do now will determine how the next phase of civilization unfolds,” Hassabis wrote in his manifesto.
Hassabis has spent recent months conducting private consultations to build support for his proposal, meeting with Trump administration officials, leaders of other AI laboratories, and European government representatives before making his plan public. He reported receiving positive responses from the administration, which had previously adopted a hands-off stance toward AI regulation before the recent Mythos incident raised alarm bells.
The DeepMind chief, who commands significant respect across different factions within the AI community, indicated that leaders of other major AI labs have expressed agreement with the general direction of his proposal. “This is where the industry needs to go,” Hassabis said of the feedback he has received. His timeline for implementation is ambitious, aiming for the new regulatory body to become operational before the end of the current year.
The proposed oversight structure would model itself after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which serves as a private, industry-funded organization that regulates Wall Street firms under SEC supervision. Under Hassabis’s framework, companies developing frontier AI systems would initially submit their models voluntarily to the new body up to 30 days before public release for comprehensive safety evaluations examining dangerous capabilities in cybersecurity, biological threats, and deceptive behaviors.
After the testing protocols demonstrate their effectiveness and reliability, Hassabis envisions formalizing the process. This would transform the voluntary submission into a mandatory requirement, meaning frontier AI models would need to pass safety evaluations before deployment in the United States market. The proposed governance structure includes a board with an independent majority composed of Turing Award recipients and other highly credentialed experts, complemented by representatives from industry, government, and the open-source community.
The regulatory framework would apply universally to all frontier-class AI models, regardless of their country of origin or whether they operate as closed or open systems. The benchmarks defining frontier-class status would receive regular updates as AI capabilities advance. Hassabis suggested that the frontier designation itself would become a badge of prestige, telling Axios, “I think that’s a pretty nice, prestige kind of asset to have.”
The proposal comes in the wake of the Trump administration’s recent emergency actions regarding Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable AI models. Hassabis described this episode as “a bit of a wake-up call,” demonstrating Washington’s need for more robust regulatory mechanisms than improvised directives. Anthropic experienced an abrupt freeze of its most powerful models through an export-control order and spent two and a half weeks negotiating their release without any established protocols or guidelines in place.
To avoid similar treatment, OpenAI proactively agreed to limit access to its GPT-5.6 model to government-approved partners at launch. The model received public release the following week after negotiations and testing with the Commerce Department concluded.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has separately advocated for binding regulation, proposing an FAA-style agency with authority to block unsafe AI models. The leaders of Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude systems now share the view that Washington should regulate their work, with their primary disagreement centering on which entity should hold regulatory authority.
Hassabis believes artificial general intelligence, defined as a system possessing all cognitive capabilities of the human brain, is likely only a few years away. He describes humanity as standing in “the foothills of the singularity,” writing, “We’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.”
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Read more at Axios here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.