The UK government, with its reversals on climate policy and commitment to oil drilling and air pollution, usually seems to be pro-apocalypse. But lately, senior British politicians have been on a save-the-world tour. Prime minister Rishi Sunak, his ministers, and diplomats have been briefing their international counterparts about the existential dangers of runaway artificial superintelligence, which, they warn, could engineer bioweapons, empower autocrats, undermine democracy, and threaten the financial system. “I do not believe we can hold back the tide,” deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden told the United Nations in late September.
Dowden’s doomerism is supposed to drum up support for the UK government’s global summit on AI governance, scheduled for November 1 and 2. The event is being billed as the moment that the tide turns on the specter of killer AI, a chance to start building international consensus toward mitigating that risk. The summit is an important event for Sunak, who has trumpeted his desire to turn the UK into “not just the intellectual home, but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” along with broader plans to create a “new Silicon Valley” and a “technology superpower.” But just over a week before it begins, the summit looks set to be simultaneously doom-laden and underwhelming. Two sources with direct knowledge of the proposed content of discussions say that its flagship initiative will be a voluntary global register of large AI models—an essentially toothless initiative. Its ability to capture the full range of leading global AI projects would depend on the good will of large US and Chinese tech companies, which don’t generally see eye to eye.
How is the rest of the summit shaping up? Sources close to negotiations say that the US government is annoyed that the UK has invited Chinese officials (and so are some members of the UK’s ruling Conservative Party). The attendee list hasn’t been released, but leading companies and investors in the UK’s domestic AI sector are angry that they’ve not been invited, cutting them out of discussions about the future of their industry. And they and other AI experts say that the government’s focus on the fringe concern of AI-driven cataclysm means the event will ignore the more immediate real-world risks of the technology—and all of its potential upsides.
“I don’t know what the UK is bringing to the table in all this,” says Keegan McBride, lecturer in AI, government, and policy, at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. “They’re so narrow in their focus.” He and others in the British AI scene argue it would be better for the government to instead look at how it can help British AI companies compete at a moment of rapid change and huge investment in AI.
The summit agenda says that it will cover two types of AI: that which has narrow, but potentially dangerous capabilities—such as models that could be used to develop bioweapons—and “frontier AI,” a somewhat nebulous concept that the UK is defining as huge, multipurpose artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds the power of large language models like the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That filter automatically narrows the list of attendees. “Only a handful of companies are doing this,” says McBride. “They’re almost all American or Chinese, and the infrastructure that you need to train these sorts of models are basically all owned by American companies like Amazon or Google or Microsoft.”
WIRED spoke to more than a dozen British AI experts and executives. None had been invited to the summit. The only representative of the UK AI industry known to be attending is Google DeepMind, which was founded in London but acquired by the search giant in 2014. That’s causing a lot of frustration.
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