Artificial intelligence’s ability to wreak mass destruction in the hands of terrorists will dominate a summit of world leaders.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been warning of the risks posed by AI for months and is urging the international community to adopt guards to prevent it being misused.
The UK government has now confirmed an upcoming AI safety summit in Bletchley Park in November will focus on fears over the technology being used by terrorists to create bioweapons or cyber-attacks and the emergence of advanced systems that escape human control.
It said in a statement: “There are two areas the summit will particularly focus on: misuse risks, for example, where a bad actor is aided by new AI capabilities in biological or cyber-attacks, and loss of control risks that could emerge from advanced systems that we would seek to be aligned with our values and intentions.”
Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes was once the top-secret home of Britain’s World War Two codebreakers.
Officials have been alarmed by developments in AI models including one last year that saw a tool taking only six hours to suggest 40,000 different potentially lethal molecules – some of which were similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed.
Government sources told The Guardian they are worried a criminal or terrorist could use AI to help them work out the ingredients for a bioweapon, before sending them to a robotic laboratory where they can be mixed and dispatched without any human oversight.
Benedict Macon-Cooney, chief policy strategist at the Tony Blair Institute, which recently published a policy report on AI, told the newspaper: “Biosecurity, autonomous weapons systems – these are things we have to make sure we get answers to.
“Many in the AI industry have told politicians these are real risks. Politicians have been posed the question, and they must come up with a response.”
The UK government is spending £100 million on a new AI taskforce to help test algorithms as they are developed and British officials plan to use the summit to urge companies around the world to send their AI tools to Britain for assessment.
Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden has said: “Only nation states can provide reassurance that the most significant national security concerns have been allayed.”
A government spokesperson added AI had “enormous potential to change every aspect of our lives” and said its Frontier AI taskforce had been established to ensure the technology was developed safely and responsibly, with the AI safety summit also looking at “a range of possible risks”.
