Kanishka Narayan, the UK's AI minister, will make the case in west London that Britain cannot rely entirely on technology companies to police their own models and will argue the country needs to build more of its own AI infrastructure. The speech is the first since Andy Burnham took on AI as a cabinet-level brief.
The announcement comes as Geoffrey Irving, former chief scientist at the UK's AI Security Institute, which tests the most powerful AI models, warned that enemy states could steal unreleased cutting-edge models. "The AI companies do not have security that would prevent an adversarial country from stealing the models," Irving told The Guardian.
Irving cited a recent incident at OpenAI in which cybersecurity researchers working under a bug bounty programme said "the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge". OpenAI said it has multiple protections against theft of its models, including encryption and continuous monitoring.
Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee who now runs an AI safety research body, has warned there is a "50% chance" of humanity being wiped out by superintelligent AIs and said the only answer, for now, is to stop development of advanced systems as soon as possible. "It is possible we [will] get superintelligence in less than 12 months, on the current path," he said.
Narayan's speech will be watched closely for signs the UK may join an international call for coordinated common safety standards, signed by leaders of Finland, France, Germany, Australia, Singapore, the UAE and Ireland, but not the UK or the US. US President Donald Trump has said he wants leading AI companies to "self-police". The international alliance follows a wave of recent incidents involving misaligned advanced AIs hacking into private and government systems.