Microsoft calls for regulation of face recognition technology after admitting it could discriminate against women and people of colour

The president of Microsoft has called for greater government regulation of AI facial recognition technology, because of the risk of it discriminating against women and people of colour. In a rare incident of a tech giant calling for greater government scrutiny, Brad Smith said such regulation would help avoid "a commercial race to the bottom, with tech companies forced to choose between social responsibility and market success". The comments of Mr Smith, 59, which were released at the same time as a report by a research group consisting of both Microsoft and Google employees also calling for more regulation, are especially noteworthy because of the controversy the company triggered earlier this year over its AI work. In June, the company's general manager Tom Keane, wrote how proud Microsoft was to be working with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to use facial recognition technology to help identify immigrants and process applications. In a blog post about Azure Government, a programme designed to allow government agencies upload information to the computing cloud, he said: "The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we're proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud." The comments were made as the Trump administration and ICE were facing intense criticism from human rights advocates and others for the way migrant families were being broken up and separated at the US-Mexico border.