TikTok Pays £12.7m UK Fine as Gates Calls for AI Regulation

TikTok will pay a £12.7m penalty to the UK's data watchdog after withdrawing its appeal against a 2023 ruling, the Guardian reported. The Information Commissioner's Office found the video app did not do enough to keep under-13s off the platform. It also failed to remove underage users once it knew they were there.

The ICO said up to 1.75 million UK children under 13 used the service in 2020. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and states a minimum age of 13. When the fine was issued, the then information commissioner John Edwards told the Guardian the company was "not doing enough" on three fronts: preventing under-13s from signing up, removing them when identified, and detecting them in the first place.

Disagreement, then payment

TikTok said it disagreed with the ruling but chose to pay because the case covered the period from 2018 to 2020. The company says it has since introduced "many youth safety measures and policies". It also dropped a separate appeal against an ICO request for information about how its algorithm processes teenagers' personal data and serves potentially harmful content. The ICO said it will now resume that investigation.

The ICO's deputy commissioner, Emily Keaney, framed the outcome as a precedent: "Our successful action against TikTok shows how important it is for companies to have the right protections in place, including to prevent access by children who are not old enough to be using their services."

Age-checking sits at the centre of the UK government's planned under-16 social media limit, due to take effect next year. Ofcom has said "more action from the tech industry is needed" as that deadline approaches. Australia's eSafety commissioner, quoted in the same Guardian piece, said a "substantial proportion" of under-16s there have kept accounts, created new ones or bypassed age-gating since the country's own ban began last December. That is the awkward comparison for anyone arguing age gates work as designed.

Gates: self-regulation is not enough

Three days after the TikTok story, Bill Gates told NBC's Kristen Welker in an interview aired on Sunday that AI left unchecked could cause "a billion deaths", and that industry self-policing will not do. "You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like," the Microsoft co-founder said, adding that it "has to be a required thing". He described the cost as "a little bit of overhead for the industry", not a dramatic slowdown.

"There's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools."

Gates also dismissed the idea of a kill switch as sufficient on its own, saying the debate over one "just sort of shows how non-technical various people are". His remarks follow a nearly 6,000-word essay published in late August on the same theme. They arrive alongside similar warnings from Sam Altman and Elon Musk, according to the Guardian. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed legislation on 23 September to pause advanced AI development while guardrails are put in place.

Both stories follow the same pattern. Platforms and model builders say they can police themselves, and legislators increasingly say that is not enough. TikTok's case ended in a payment and a resumed investigation. The AI rules Gates wants do not yet exist.

Funding is still flowing to companies selling controls rather than waiting for them. Kontext, a Berlin-based AI security startup, raised $4m on 24 September in a round led by 42CAP, with a16z CSX and HTGF participating, Tech.eu reported. Its software sits between AI agents and the systems they touch. It evaluates each action against policy before it happens and blocks unauthorised ones. That is the commercial version of the argument Gates is making to politicians: somebody has to hold the switch, and right now it is mostly vendors selling one.