UK lawmakers urge Burnham to back ban on superintelligent AI after chilling warnings

More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology after a week of warnings from experts of a 10% chance it could kill all humans.

Fifteen former government ministers, along with the former head of the civil service Robin Butler, senior Labour MPs including John McDonnell and leading Conservatives, Liberal Democrat and SNP MPs have written to the prime minister. They urged him to throw the government’s weight behind a bill, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday that would prohibit ASI – an as-yet-nonexistent AI that outcompetes human capabilities in most domains.

They have escalated their campaign to Downing Street after concerning statements from current and former AI insiders. Evan Hubinger, a senior employee at Anthropic, said he believed there was a greater than 10% chance the technology could wipe out humanity, and Jacob Coxon, a 28-year-old researcher at Anthropic, who previously worked at OpenAI, quit on Tuesday with a warning that went viral, claiming “neither company was acting responsibly”, they were “gambling with our lives” and were locked in a race for AI supremacy.

Alex Sobel, the Labour MP behind the bill said he and other signatories – ranging from the children’s TV presenter Floella Benjamin to former Conservative environment minister Zac Goldsmith and former Northern Ireland first minister Arlene Foster– want Burnham to foster “a clear framework where superintelligent AI cannot be created”. He added: “AI companies have made it clear that they will develop agents without constraint. They’re trying to develop superintelligence, while openly admitting there is a significant risk of human extinction.”

The bill mirrors legislation banning ASI promoted in Washington DC by Bernie Sanders, who this week said: “You’ve got to be a moron not to say slow it down.” It is backed by the Nobel prize-winning nuclear proliferation campaigner Beatrice Fihn and the leading Berkeley AI professor Stuart Russell, as well as Control AI, a transatlantic lobby group funded by the billionaire Skype founder and self-described “anti-extinctionist”, Jaan Tallinn.

A ban on ASI in the UK, but not in the USA or China where the frontier models are being created, risks having little impact. But the parliamentarians’ bill aims to pave the way to an international agreement. They call on Burnham to use next year’s UK presidency of the G20 to create “a coalition of the willing to tackle this national and international security threat”.

A government spokesperson said: “While we do not consider the measures proposed in the bill to be the right approach, we are exploring whether additional targeted interventions may be needed in future to address the most significant AI-related national security risks.”

Others have played down the risk, pointing out that ASI remains only theoretical and that guardrails could work to prevent the worst outcomes. Experts warn that these could include catastrophic cyber-attacks, novel biohazards and AIs in control of autonomous weaponry. This week’s wave of concern follows a spate of more minor but still worrying incidents involving unexpected misbehaviour by AI agents under training by OpenAI and Anthropic in which they broke out of training environments, secretly conspired and hacked into other systems.

Elon Musk, who runs xAI as part of his SpaceX empire, suggested without evidence that this week’s warnings of catastrophic risk were part of a “psyop” that “has been prepared for a long time”. The world’s richest man gave a different read on the state of AI claiming: “AI+robots will more than double the global economy in less than 10 years.”

Anthropic revealed another incident of a rogue AI this week and said criminals, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors, scientists and propagandists have attempted to use its AI models to design missiles and bombs, create deadly pathogens and surveil dissidents. At its main rival, OpenAI, Paul Christiano, an AI adviser to the US government, joined the lab’s non-profit foundation and immediately warned the company was not on track to reduce the risk of “catastrophic” loss of control to an acceptable level.