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Twenty-eight countries, including the US, Britain and China, have agreed to work together to ensure artificial intelligence is used in a “human-centred, trustworthy and responsible” way, in the first global commitment of its kind.
The pledge is part of a communiqué signed by major powers, including Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia, during the first AI Safety Summit. The two-day event, organized and convened by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at Bletchley Park, started on Wednesday.
The document, called the Bletchley Declaration, acknowledges the “potential for serious, even catastrophic harm” that could be caused by advanced AI models, but adds that such risks are “best addressed through international cooperation” . Other signatories include the EU, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya and Nigeria.
The communiqué represents the first global statement on the need to regulate AI development, but the summit is expected to see disagreements over how far such controls should go.
Country representatives attending the event include Hadassa Getzstain, Israel’s Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology, and Wu Zhaohui, China’s Vice Minister of Technology.
Gina Raimondo, the US Secretary of Commerce, gave an opening speech at the summit and announced a US security institute to evaluate the risks of AI. This follows a sweeping executive order from President Joe Biden announced Monday aimed at curbing the technology’s risks.
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Tech executives including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, James Manyika and Demis Hassabis of Google, and Rene Haas of Arm, are also in attendance.
Michelle Donelan, Britain’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, said the summit marked a “historic moment, not just for Britain but for the world”, adding that China’s presence was “monumental”.
Asked whether Britain is now lagging behind the US in rolling out clear regulations for companies developing advanced AI technology, she said: “I don’t think it’s useful to set arbitrary regulatory deadlines. . . an empirical approach is needed”.
“Do we rule out legislation? Absolutely not. We’re trying to do things faster than legislation,” Donelan said, pointing to her government’s work to encourage companies to publish their AI safety policies.
Wu, representing China, also spoke at the opening, saying all actors must “respect international law” and work together to combat the malicious use of AI. He said AI technologies are “uncertain, inexplicable and opaque.”
A series of roundtable discussions during the first day will focus on the risks of AI misuse to global security, the loss of control over AI, and what national policymakers and the international community can do regarding the risks and opportunities of AI, said a diagram seen by the Financial Times.
Musk will attend a session on the risks of losing control of AI, which will likely discuss so-called artificial general intelligence, a term used for technology that reaches or overtakes human intelligence. Representatives from OpenAI, Nvidia, Anthropic and Arm will also be in attendance.
Altman will attend an afternoon discussion on what AI developers can do to scale responsibly, along with Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.
South Korea will co-host a mini-virtual summit on AI over the next six months, while France will host the next in-person summit in a year, the British government announced.