UK reveals AI agreement as Elon Musk warns of humanity's extinction

The US, China and 26 other nations agreed to work together to protect against the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to cause “catastrophic harm,” as government ministers and industry executives met on Wednesday at the UK’s global AI Safety summit.

Nations “have stated a shared responsibility to address AI risks and take forward vital international collaboration on frontier AI safety and research,” UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a statement shortly after the 2-day summit opened at Britain’s World War II code-breaking center in Bletchley Park, north of London. 

Sunak hailed the agreement as a “landmark achievement” that marks the willingness of the world’s greatest AI powers to collaborate on regulating the emerging technology. China’s involvement is particularly significant, given fraught relations that exist with western nations over areas like trade, security and human rights. 

“China is willing to enhance our dialogue and communication in AI safety with all sides, contributing to an international mechanism with global participation in governance framework that needs wide consensus,” Wu Zhaohui said at the start of the summit, according to an official translation of his remarks. China said it wanted to work with international partners to manage the oversight of AI. Musk, who had earlier warned AI could lead to humanity's extinction said the summit wanted to establish a “third-party referee” for companies developing the technology, so it could sound the alarm when risks develop, and so instil confidence in the public.

Britain published a “Bletchley Declaration”, agreed with the European Union and 28 countries including the United States and China, aimed at boosting global efforts to cooperate on artificial intelligence (AI) safety. It set out a two-pronged agenda focused on identifying risks of shared concern and building the scientific understanding of them, and also building cross-country policies to mitigate them.