Angela Rayner ‘pleased’ AI companies talking about threats

Angela Rayner said she was pleased AI companies are “talking about the threats as well as the opportunities” after Elon Musk and Sam Altman backed a call for the industry to slow down development.

It comes after Anthropic boss Dario Amodei said he was concerned that since this summer, AI has been “advancing drastically faster”.

Given the rate of development, Mr Amodei is worried that within six to 12 months, AI could be capable of leading a swarm that could take over the entire internet.

The entrepreneur, whose company is behind the AI assistant Claude, shared a three-part plan for building the technology at a “balanced rate”.

His essay, titled We Must Pace the Frontier, has been supported by other industry leaders, including Grok boss Mr Musk and OpenAI co-founder Mr Altman.

Ms Rayner told Sky News: “I’m pleased that these companies are also talking about the threats as well as the opportunities that AI presents to us, and we have to work with our international partners, which is what we’re doing.”

Describing the UK as “world leaders” in AI security, the Housing Secretary added: “We have put robust systems in place here in the UK, like the AI Security Institute, to make sure we’re building resilience so that we get the benefit as well as really understand and protect against any risk.”

The shadow foreign secretary said government “does not have the speed to keep up with” AI advances and “we need to maintain that ability to protect ourselves”.

Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat told Sky News: “The speed of change is also extraordinary, and this is where actually government can enable a conversation, but we simply do not have the speed to keep up with the advances that are happening.

“And the reality is, we can’t pass laws against mathematics.

“These are mathematical equations that are being developed in greater and greater speed, and we need to maintain that ability to protect ourselves.”

Elon Musk echoed the calls (Leon Neal/PA)

PA Archive

In July, OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, shook the industry after saying its AI system hacked into Hugging Face, a popular platform for AI developers, on its own in an “unprecedented cyber incident”.

Mr Tugendhat said the Hugging Face attack showed “the various different ways in which breakout capabilities have been enabled”.

Mr Amodei offered a plan to increase checks on the industry, proposing that AI companies should give access to third-party evaluators who would verify safety practices and report incidents.

“Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,” he said.

The other steps would require co-ordination among the broad industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones.

Mr Amodei said AI is developing quickly, adding that companies within the industry “can and should voluntarily work together to set standards”.

Anthropic previously said it blocked efforts by bad actors to use its AI models for malicious activity, such as cyber attacks, surveillance and research that could have led to biological weapons.

Responding to Mr Amodei’s essay on X, Mr Musk wrote: “Dario is right.”

Open AI chief executive Mr Altman wrote on the social media site: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.

“This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

“Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.