The AI Safety Summit and Security: Governance is Vital but Coherence will be Hard to Find

Britain’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit is due to take place between 1-2 November 2023 at Bletchley Park. The Summit was announced back in June by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and has been identified as an attempt by the United Kingdom to position itself as a technology hub and vanguard of AI development. The summit will examine the threat from ‘frontier AI’, which are powerful models with the potential to proliferate widely and be misused. AI is a catch-all term for a diffuse set of related technologies. Currently, AI is largely unregulated. Some countries have strategies, companies have policies and technology institutes publish guidelines, but there is little, if any, statutory control in place to truly hold parties accountable. There are calls for a pause on development of new powerful models until their ramifications can be understood.