{"id":597497,"date":"2026-09-11T21:42:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T21:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/597497\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T21:42:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T21:42:14","slug":"uk-lawmakers-urge-burnham-to-back-ban-on-superintelligent-ai-after-chilling-warnings-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/597497\/","title":{"rendered":"UK lawmakers urge Burnham to back ban on superintelligent AI after chilling warnings | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology after a week of warnings<\/a> from experts of a 10% chance it could kill all humans.<\/p>\n

Fifteen former government ministers, along with the former head of the civil service Robin Butler, senior Labour MPs including John McDonnell and leading Conservatives, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party MPs have written to the prime minister. They urged him to throw the government\u2019s weight behind a bill, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday, that would prohibit ASI \u2013 an as-yet-nonexistent AI that would outcompete human capabilities in most domains.<\/p>\n

They have escalated their campaign to Downing Street after concerning statements from current and former AI insiders<\/a>. Evan Hubinger, a senior employee at Anthropic, said he believed there was a greater than 10% chance the technology could wipe out humanity, and Jacob Coxon, a 28-year-old researcher at Anthropic, who previously worked at OpenAI, quit on Tuesday with a warning that went viral, claiming \u201cneither company was acting responsibly\u201d, they were \u201cgambling with our lives\u201d and were locked in a race for AI supremacy.<\/p>\n

Alex Sobel, the Labour MP behind the bill, said he and other signatories \u2013 ranging from the children\u2019s TV presenter Floella Benjamin to the former Conservative environment minister Zac Goldsmith and former Northern Ireland first minister Arlene Foster \u2013 want Burnham to foster \u201ca clear framework where superintelligent AI cannot be created\u201d. He added: \u201cAI companies have made it clear that they will develop agents without constraint. They\u2019re trying to develop superintelligence, while openly admitting there is a significant risk of human extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill mirrors legislation banning ASI promoted in Washington DC by Bernie Sanders, who this week said: \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be a moron not to say slow it down.\u201d It is backed by the Nobel prize-winning nuclear proliferation campaigner Beatrice Fihn and the leading Berkeley AI professor Stuart Russell, as well as Control AI, a transatlantic lobby group funded by the billionaire Skype co-founder and self-described \u201canti-extinctionist\u201d Jaan Tallinn.<\/p>\n

A ban on ASI in the UK, but not in the US or China where the frontier models are being created, risks having little impact. But the parliamentarians\u2019 bill aims to pave the way to an international agreement. They call on Burnham to use next year\u2019s UK presidency of the G20 to create \u201ca coalition of the willing to tackle this national and international security threat\u201d.<\/p>\n

A government spokesperson said: \u201cWhile we do not consider the measures proposed in the bill to be the right approach, we are exploring whether additional targeted interventions may be needed in future to address the most significant AI-related national security risks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others have played down the risk, saying that ASI remains only theoretical and that guardrails could work to prevent the worst outcomes. Experts warn that these could include catastrophic cyber-attacks, novel biohazards and AIs in control of autonomous weaponry. This week\u2019s wave of concern follows a spate of more minor but still worrying incidents<\/a> involving unexpected misbehaviour by AI agents under training by OpenAI and Anthropic in which they broke out of training environments, secretly conspired and hacked into other systems.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk, who runs xAI as part of his SpaceX empire, suggested without evidence that this week\u2019s warnings of catastrophic risk were part of a \u201cpsyop\u201d that \u201chas been prepared for a long time\u201d. The world\u2019s richest man gave a different read on the state of AI, claiming: \u201cAI+robots will more than double the global economy in less than 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Anthropic revealed another incident of a rogue AI this week and said<\/a> criminals, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors, scientists and propagandists had attempted to use its AI models to design missiles and bombs, create deadly pathogens and surveil dissidents. At its main rival, OpenAI, Paul Christiano, an AI adviser to the US government, joined the lab\u2019s non-profit foundation and immediately warned<\/a> the company was not on track to reduce the risk of \u201ccatastrophic\u201d loss of control to an acceptable level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-597497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}