UK Government hosts landmark AI Safety Summit

Several nations, business leaders and AI experts have convened at Bletchley Park for the first-ever AI Safety Summit, hosted by the UK Government. 

The US, France, Singapore, Italy, Japan and China are among the nations confirmed to attend, alongside representatives from The Alan Turing Institute, The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Ada Lovelace Institute.

The historic venue will play host to crucial talks around risks and opportunities posed by rapid advances in AI over the course of the two-day event. 

Secretary of State Michelle Donelan will open the event where she will look to make progress on talks on identifying risks, opportunities and the need for international collaboration.

Day one will see several roundtable discussions dedicated to improving frontier AI safety with key UK based developers such as Open-AI, Anthropic and UK based Deepmind. Delegates will consider how risk thresholds, effective safety assessments, and robust governance and accountability mechanisms can be defined to enable the safe scaling of frontier AI by developers.

Discussions will be centred around the risks emerging from rapid advances in AI, before exploring the transformative opportunities the technology has to offer - including in education and areas for international research collaborations.  

The Secretary of State will be joined by members of the UK’s Frontier AI Taskforce - including its Chair, Ian Hogarth – which launched earlier this year to evaluate the risks of frontier AI models. 

Working together 

Secretary of State Michelle Donelan said: “AI is already an extraordinary force for good in our society, with limitless opportunity to grow the global economy, deliver better public services and tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. But the risks posed by frontier AI are serious and substantive and it is critical that we work together, both across sectors and countries to recognise these risks.

“This summit provides an opportunity for us to ensure we have the right people with the right expertise gathered around the table to discuss how we can mitigate these risks moving forward. Only then will we be able to truly reap the benefits of this transformative technology in a responsible manner.”