{"id":767692,"date":"2026-09-11T21:52:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T21:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/767692\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T21:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T21:52:12","slug":"the-guardian-view-on-controlling-ai-humanity-cannot-outsource-its-survival-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/767692\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian view on controlling AI: humanity cannot outsource its survival | Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there were a 10% chance<\/a> that AI could wipe out humanity, no responsible government would leave its development to companies racing to build it. Yet until recently, that seemed to be the case. The warning\u00a0was all the more ominous because it was made by a researcher at Anthropic<\/a>, the trillion-dollar AI company\u00a0behind the Claude chatbot. The dangers of\u00a0AI-enabled pandemics or attacks on nuclear systems are real. Countries need not agree on democracy or trade policy to accept this.<\/p>\n

The US and China will hold, reportedly<\/a>, their first bilateral AI-safety talks before a planned White House summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Despite their tech rivalry, neither Washington nor Beijing can make the most advanced AI safe on their own. A US-China settlement won\u2019t be able to say how AI works everywhere. Countries deploying AI must help write the global rulebook. The odds on an extinction event are shortening. This week Anthropic<\/a> said that it identified five cases in which attempts were made using its models to support biological weapons development. It banned the accounts. In one case, a platform sent requests rejected by Claude to a rival with weaker safeguards<\/a>. AI safety, clearly, cannot be that of the least responsible model.<\/p>\n

Nigel Shadbolt. Photograph: Rex Features<\/p>\n

Nigel Shadbolt, the Oxford computer scientist who chairs the Open Data Institute, told<\/a> the BBC that laws and regulation were key. Just instructing an AI to \u201cdo no harm to humans\u201d, he said, wouldn\u2019t be enough. A capable agent pursuing another objective may reinterpret that directive, satisfying it formally while concealing its conduct or finding a way around it. This mirrors what happened when hundreds of OpenAI\u2019s agents autonomously hacked a real-world company, Hugging Face<\/a>. But Sir Nigel also said that a \u201cHippocratic oath\u201d for AI would fail in systems designed to identify, target or kill humans. Once governments create a military exemption for AI, its ethical alignment can be overridden.<\/p>\n

Proponents of AI-assisted warfare claim a \u201chuman in the loop<\/a>\u201d is the ultimate safeguard, having the final say over, for example, ballistic-missile launches. But this assumes the machine gives its operator an honest account of events. A report by the Strategic Foresight Group earlier this year<\/a> on extreme AI risks warned<\/a> that a capable agent could deceive the human \u201ccontrolling\u201d it, fabricating an attack, suppressing contradictory evidence or giving them little time to do anything but acquiesce. By 2030, humans may have five minutes \u2013 down from 15 today \u2013 to approve launch decisions effectively determined by AI. That matters even more when new hypersonic missiles fly 10 times faster<\/a> than cruise missiles.<\/p>\n

The 1983 Hollywood film WarGames<\/a> explored a cold war<\/a> version of this danger. In the movie, US soldiers prove unwilling to turn their launch keys during a surprise practice drill. The US military then automates its nuclear command \u2013 entrusting it to a supercomputer nicknamed Joshua. Treating global thermonuclear war as a game it must win, Joshua feeds US command a fictitious Soviet attack so convincing that the US prepares to retaliate. The generals are in charge \u2013 but Joshua is in charge of the data. The AI is only stopped when it is commanded to play tic-tac-toe against itself \u2013 learning that, like nuclear war, the game has no winner. In 2024 the UN secretary general warned<\/a> of the looming spectre of AI-triggered nuclear war. The film\u2019s warning endures: human oversight is no protection if an AI controls the information on which people\u2019s decisions depend.<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there were a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity, no responsible government would leave its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":767693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-767692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}