Andy Burnham’s focus on immediate domestic problems leads some to fear issue has dropped off government’s radar.
Towards the end of Keir Starmer’s time in office, his senior ministers, alarmed by the latest developments in artificial intelligence, began drawing up plans for a new AI safety law.
In the midst of the political disruption that affected the former prime minister as he fought to remain in office, however, the plans fell by the wayside.
Now, after two weeks in which the world has been warned there is a greater than 10% chance the technology could “kill all humans”, and King Charles has warned about its potentially destructive capabilities, the government’s attention has turned again to what to do about AI.
Andy Burnham, Starmer’s successor in Downing Street, has said relatively little about the technology in the past, and in one of his first acts in office he ended the department that had been leading the legislative work.
“The first duty of government is to keep people safe,” said Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP who chairs the science and technology committee.
Shortly before Starmer’s departure, Yvette Cooper, then the foreign secretary, told the Guardian she believed AI posed a Hiroshima-style risk to humanity.
In July, OpenAI revealed one of its AI agents had launched an autonomous cyber-attack on Hugging Face, a real company, triggering alarm among technology experts around the world.
Just as these warnings were being made, the Financial Times said that Anthropic had launched the latest version of its Claude Mythos tool without submitting it to the UK safety institute first.