The UK, US, EU and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology.
Twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit, hosted by the British government.
The declaration does not agree to set up an international testing hub in the UK, as some in the British government had hoped. But it does provide a template for international collaboration in the future, with future safety summits now planned in South Korea in six months’ time and in France in a year.
The declaration says: “There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The UK, US, EU and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology.
Michelle Donelan, the UK technology secretary, told reporters: “For the first time we now have countries agreeing that we need to look not just independently but collectively at the risks around frontier AI.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the summit, the technology billionaire Elon Musk warned: “For the first time, we have a situation where there’s something that is going to be far smarter than the smartest human … It’s not clear to me we can actually control such a thing.”
The communique marks a diplomatic success for the UK and for Sunak in particular, who decided to host the summit this summer after becoming concerned with the way in which AI models were advancing rapidly without oversight.
She was joined onstage by the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, and the Chinese vice-minister of science and technology, Wu Zhaohui, in a rare show of global unity.
Meanwhile the EU is in the process of passing an AI bill, which aims to develop a set of principles for regulation, as well as bringing in rules for specific technologies such as live facial recognition.
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