Kanishka Narayan to say Britain cannot rely entirely on tech companies amid rising global concern over AI dangers

Companies building the most advanced AI systems must increase safety efforts, the UK’s AI minister will say, as he announces a strengthening of Britain’s cyber defences.

Kanishka Narayan will call on companies developing frontier AI to do more to make sure it is safe. He will say Britain cannot rely entirely on technology companies to police their own models and will argue the UK needs to build more of its own AI infrastructure.

Narayan’s speech in west London will be the first since Andy Burnham made AI a cabinet-level brief. It comes as Geoffrey Irving, a former chief scientist at the UK’s AI Security Institute, which tests the most powerful AI models, raised fears enemy states could steal unreleased cutting-edge models. Amid increasing global concern at dangers posed by AI, Irving told the Guardian: “The AI companies do not have security that would prevent an adversarial country from stealing the models.”

He cited a recent incident at OpenAI where it was “hacked” by cybersecurity researchers, who said “the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge”. The attack was carried out under an OpenAI programme that rewarded ethical hackers testing its systems. OpenAI says it has multiple protections against theft of its models, including encryption and continuous monitoring.

Irving, a former employee at OpenAI and Google DeepMind who now runs an AI safety research body , has warned there is a “50% chance” of humanity being wiped out by superintelligent AIs and the only answer, for now, is to stop development of advanced systems as soon as possible.

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