UK’s Sunak discusses AI risks with Kamala Harris at summit before chat with Elon Musk

BLETCHLEY PARK – British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and senior politicians from around the world agreed Thursday at a U.K. summit on the importance — if not the details — of containing risks from rapid advances in cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Sunak organized the first-ever AI Safety Summit as a forum for officials, experts and the tech industry to better understand cutting-edge, “frontier” AI that some scientists warn could pose a risk to humanity’s very existence.

The leaders of the United Nations and the European Union joined talks on the second day of the meeting, held at a former codebreaking spy base near London. It kicked off on Wednesday with an agreement signed by 28 nations, including the U.S. and China, to work toward “shared agreement and responsibility” about AI risks, and a plan to hold further meetings in South Korea and France over the next year.

China did not attend the second day, which focused on meetings among what the U.K. termed a small group of countries “with shared values.” Sunak held a roundtable with politicians from the EU, the U.N., Italy, Germany, France and Australia.

“I wanted us to have a session to talk about this issue as leaders with shared values in private and hear from all of you about what you’re most excited about, what you’re concerned about and how we can look back in five years’ time on this moment and know that we made the right choices to harness all the benefits of AI in a way that will be safe for our communities but deliver enormous potential as well,” he said.

Binding regulation for AI is not among the summit’s goals. Sunak has said that the U.K.’s approach should not be to rush into regulation but to fully understand AI first.

Harris emphasized the U.S. administration’s more hands-on approach in a speech at the U.S. embassy on Wednesday, saying the world needs to act right away to address “the full spectrum” of AI risks, not just existential threats such as massive cyberattacks or AI-formulated bioweapons.

She announced a new U.S. AI safety institute to draw up standards for testing AI models for public use. Sunak had proposed his own AI safety institute, with a similar role, days earlier.

One of the Biden administration’s main concerns is that advances in AI are widening inequality within societies and between countries. As a step towards addressing that, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly announced a $100 million fund, supported by the U.K., the U.S. and others, to help ensure African countries get a share of AI’s benefits – and that 46 African languages are fed into its models.

Cleverly told reporters that it’s crucial there is a “diversity of voice” informing AI.

“If it was just Euro-Atlantic and China, we would miss stuff, potentially huge amounts of stuff,” he said.

The fund is arguably a modest step, given the scale of investment and profits AI has already generated. Cleverly said the summit and projects announced here are only “an important first step” on a long road.

“We’re not trying to answer all the questions today,” he said. “This is about defining the exam questions.”

Sunak has also proposed a global expert panel on AI, similar to the United Nations climate change panel. The British leader, who met U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the summit on Thursday, is expected to provide more details of the proposal.

He’s also scheduled to discuss AI with Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Thursday evening in a conversation that will be played on the social network X, which Musk owns, after the summit ends.

Musk is among tech executives who have warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity’s future.

“Here we are for the first time, really in human history, with something that is going to be far more intelligent than us,” Musk said at the summit. “It’s not clear to me if we can control such a thing.”

Sunak said it was important not to be “alarmist” about the technology, which could bring huge benefits.

“But there is a case to believe that it may pose a risk on a scale like pandemics and nuclear war, and that’s why, as leaders, we have a responsibility to act to take the steps to protect people, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” he said.