UK Politicians Call for Binding AI Regulation
For the first time, parliamentarians have come together to acknowledge the extinction threat from AI, building a cross-party coalition in support of binding regulations to address this.
Today, a crossparty coalition of politicians has come together to support our campaign calling for binding AI regulation to be put in place on powerful AI, acknowledging the extinction threat to humanity posed by AI.
Our campaign statement reads:
Nobel Prize winners, AI scientists, and CEOs of leading AI companies have stated that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.
Specialised AIs - such as those advancing science and medicine - boost growth, innovation, and public services. Superintelligent AI systems would compromise national and global security.
The UK can secure the benefits and mitigate the risks of AI by delivering on its promise to introduce binding regulation on the most powerful AI systems.
AI development is advancing rapidly. There is currently no known method to ensure that when AI more intelligent than ourselves is developed, it will be safe or controllable.
We are faced with a risk of extinction. This has been warned of by Nobel Prize winners, hundreds of top AI researchers, and even the CEOs of the leading AI companies themselves.
The gravity of this threat and the urgency with which it must be addressed cannot be overstated. To mitigate the risks of AI, we need binding regulation on the most powerful AI systems.
The public is fully on board with this. Our polling with YouGov released today shows that 87% of the British public want AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release. Only 9% trust tech CEOs to act in the public interest:
Our campaign launch and the YouGov polling we’ve released has also been covered in a great piece by
in TIME.Assembling this growing coalition of 16 lawmakers is a significant milestone on the path to getting dangerous AI development under control.
In support of our campaign, professor Stuart Russell OBE, author of the authoritative textbook on AI wrote:
The companies driving the AI race admit they can't guarantee control over their systems and they predict a 10% to 30% chance of human extinction if they win the race. Yet they plough ahead towards superintelligent AI with virtually no oversight or regulation. In other words, they are playing Russian Roulette with the entire human race. The UK has a unique chance to show global leadership by adopting sensible rules on safety, with which developers must comply before they can deploy their systems.
While MIT Professor Max Tegmark said the following:
We're clearly closer to figuring out how to build smarter-than-human machines than to figuring out how to control them, so it's great to see these lawmakers showing leadership and working to guarantee that AI will remain a tool.
The Labour government clearly promised in its manifesto it would introduce “binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models”.
The public wants it, parliamentarians call for it, humanity needs it. Time to deliver.
We’d like to thank all the supporters of our campaign, including Lord Fairfax of Cameron, Kim Johnson, MP, The Rt Hon. the Lord Browne of Ladyton, The Rt Hon. the Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee DBE, The Rt Hon. the Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, Afzal Khan, MP, Rt Hon. the Lord Knight of Weymouth, Andrew Ranger, MP, The Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick, The Lord Ravensdale, Cara Hunter, MLA, The Lord Haskel, The Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, The Baroness Verma, Jo Platt, MP, and The Lord Strathcarron.
If you’re a UK parliamentarian and you want to protect the public from smarter than human AI, please get in touch to support the campaign!
Links
You can find our campaign page here: controlai.com/statement
We’ve also posted about it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
You can read
’s article in TIME, covering the launch here: time.com/7213096/uk-public-ai-law-poll
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