Britain to host first global summit on artificial intelligence safety

Britain to host AI safety summit this year attended by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

BRITAIN:

Britain will host a global summit on artificial intelligence safety later this year and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden will discuss the technology at their Thursday meeting, the UK government said.

The summit will consider the risks of AI, including frontier systems, and discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action, the British government said in a statement. No date was given for the event.

Biden and Sunak, who will meet on Thursday for a fourth time in as many months, will work to coordinate their approaches on critical and emerging technologies, with an eye to strengthening their economic security, British and US officials said.

US technology company Palantir Technologies, which already has more than 800 employees in Britain, will separately announce plans to make the UK its new European headquarters for AI development, the British government said.

Sunak planned wide-ranging discussions with Biden on the UK-US relationship and how the two countries could work together to strengthen their economies and cement their "joint leadership in the technologies of the future," the government said.

Several governments are considering how to mitigate the dangers of the emerging technology, which has experienced a boom in investment and consumer popularity in recent months after the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

That includes China, where the government is seeking to initiate artificial intelligence regulations, according to billionaire Elon Musk who met officials during his recent trip to China.

Regulators globally have been scrambling to draw up rules governing the use of generative AI, which can create text and images, the impact of which proponents compare to the arrival of the internet.

Sunak is on a trip to the United States and will meet Biden at the White House on Thursday.