More than 100 UK parliamentarians are calling on the government to introduce binding regulations on the most powerful AI systems as concern grows that ministers are moving too slowly to create safeguards in the face of lobbying from the technology industry.<\/p>\n
A former AI minister and defence secretary are part of a cross-party group of Westminster MPs, peers and elected members of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish legislatures demanding stricter controls on frontier systems, citing fears superintelligent AI \u201cwould compromise national and global security\u201d.<\/p>\n
The push for tougher regulation is being coordinated by a nonprofit organisation called Control AI whose backers include the co-founder of Skype, Jaan Tallinn. It is calling on Keir Starmer to show independence from Donald Trump\u2019s White House, which opposes the regulation of AI. One of the \u201cgodfathers\u201d of the technology, Yoshua Bengio, recently said it was less regulated than a sandwich<\/a>.<\/p>\n The campaigners include the Labour peer and former defence secretary Des Browne, who said superintelligent AI \u201cwould be the most perilous technological development since we gained the ability to wage nuclear war\u201d. He said only international cooperation \u201ccan prevent a reckless race for advantage that could imperil us all\u201d.<\/p>\n The Conservative peer and former environment minister Zac Goldsmith said that \u201ceven while very significant and senior figures in AI are blowing the whistle, governments are miles behind the AI companies and are leaving them to pursue its development with virtually no regulation\u201d.<\/p>\n Britain hosted an AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in 2023, which concluded there was \u201cpotential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional\u201d from the most advanced AI systems. It set up the AI Safety Institute, now called the AI Security Institute, which has become an internationally respected body. Less emphasis, however, has been placed on the summit\u2019s call to address risks through international cooperation.<\/p>\n Goldsmith said the UK should \u201cresume its global leadership on AI security by championing an international agreement to prohibit the development of superintelligence until we know what we are dealing with and how to contain it\u201d.<\/p>\n The calls for state intervention in the AI race come after one of Silicon Valley\u2019s leading AI scientists told the Guardian humanity would have to decide by 2030 whether to take the \u201cultimate risk\u201d of letting AI systems train themselves to become more powerful. Jared Kaplan, the co-founder and chief scientist at frontier AI company Anthropic, said: \u201cWe don\u2019t really want it to be a Sputnik-like situation where the government suddenly wakes up and is like: Oh, wow, AI is a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s programme set out in July 2024 said it would legislate \u201cto place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence models\u201d. But no bill has been published and the government has faced White House pressure not to inhibit commercial AI development, mostly pioneered by US firms.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: \u201cAI is already regulated in the UK, with a range of existing rules already in place. We have been clear on the need to ensure the UK and its laws are ready for the challenges and opportunities AI will bring and that position has not changed.\u201d<\/p>\n The bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, who is backing the Control AI campaign, called for an independent AI watchdog to scrutinise public sector use and for AI companies to be required to meet minimum testing standards before releasing new models.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are all kinds of risks and the government doesn\u2019t seem to have adopted a precautionary principle,\u201d he said. \u201cAt the moment there are significant risks: the mental health of children and adults, the environmental costs and other big risks in terms of the alignment of generalised AI and [the question of] what is good for humanity. The government seems to be moving away from regulation.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The UK\u2019s first AI minister under Rishi Sunak, Jonathan Berry, said the time was coming when binding regulations should be applied to models that present existential risks. He said rules should be global and would create tripwires so if AI models reached a certain power their makers would have to show they had been tested, designed with off switches and were capable of being retrained.<\/p>\n \u201cInternational frontier AI safety has not gone on in leaps and bounds as we had hoped,\u201d he said. He cited recent cases of chatbots being involved in encouraging suicides, people using them as therapists and believing they are gods. \u201cThe risks, now, are very serious and we need to be constantly on our guard,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The chief executive of Control AI, Andrea Miotti, criticised the current \u201ctimid approach\u201d and said: \u201cThere has been a lot of lobbying from the UK and US. AI companies are lobbying governments in the UK and US to stall regulation arguing it is premature and would crush innovation. Some of these are the same companies who say AIs could destroy humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the speed with which AI technology was advancing meant mandatory standards could be needed in the next one or two years.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s quite urgent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 100 UK parliamentarians are calling on the government to introduce binding regulations on the most powerful…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-180561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}