LONDON - A House of Commons committee, looking for wording that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta could all sign, agreed on 13 October that future UK AI safety law will be written in HB pencil. The labs had given different answers that day on how binding any rules should be. "The clause is in force if it is still on the page," a spokesperson for the Parliamentary Office of Provisional Statute said. The office will supply the pencils and a standard-issue eraser. Rules are fully binding while they sit on the page. A lab may rub out a clause by filing an Erasure Notice within 72 hours of a material capability change. Pre-release testing and incident reporting are the first items on the pencilled schedule. Treasury has ordered 40,000 pencils. The purchase line reads "HB, unsharpened, boxed in twelves." Labs that pushed for stricter rules will have those clauses written with heavier pressure. An unnamed industry source said the eraser clause was "a constructive starting point."