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At Bletchley, Rishi Sunak Confirms AI Safety Institute but Delays Regulations
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Reports on the formal launch of the UK AI Safety Institute at the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in November 2023, a key governance milestone establishing the first government body dedicated to evaluating frontier AI safety.
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Summary
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak formally announced the launch of the AI Safety Institute at the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, to be led by Ian Hogarth and tasked with testing the safety of emerging AI systems. The announcement accompanied the Bletchley Declaration, signed by attending nations committing to coordinated AI risk assessment. Sunak argued regulation is premature until governments better understand what they are legislating for.
Key Points
- •UK AI Safety Institute formally launched, evolving from the Frontier AI Taskforce established in June 2023, led by Ian Hogarth.
- •Yoshua Bengio will lead production of the institute's first report on AI safety.
- •The Bletchley Declaration was signed by all summit attendees, committing to joint testing and risk assessment of frontier AI.
- •Sunak resisted calls for immediate AI regulation, arguing governments must first understand the technology before legislating.
- •Funding details and industry financial contributions to the institute remain unclear.
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A Frontier AI taskforce established by the U.K. back in June to prepare for the AI Safety Summit held this week is on course to be a permanent fixture, as the U.K. bids to take a leadership role on AI policy in the future. The U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today formally announced the launch of the AI Safety Institute, a “global hub based in the U.K. and tasked with testing the safety of emerging types of AI.”
The institute was informally announced last week in the lead up to this week’s summit. Now the government has confirmed that it will be led by Ian Hogarth — an investor, founder and engineer who had also chaired the taskforce — and that Yoshuo Bengio, one of the most prominent people in the field of AI, will be taking the lead on the production of its first report.
It’s not clear how much funding the government will inject into the AI Safety Institute, or whether industry players will be expected to foot some of the bill. The institute, which will sit underneath the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, is described as “backed by leading AI companies” although that might be more in reference to endorsement rather than financial backing. We have reached out to the DSIT to ask and will update as we learn more.
The news comes alongside yesterday’s announcement of a new agreement, the Bletchley Declaration , which has been signed by all of the countries that have attended the summit and commits them to joined up testing and other commitments on assessing risks of “frontier AI” technologies, for example large language models.
“Until now, the only people testing the safety of new AI models have been the very companies developing them,” Sunak said in a meeting with journalists this evening. Citing work being done also by other countries, the UN and the G7 to address AI, now the plan will be to “work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.”
All of this, to be sure, is still very much in its early stages. The U.K. has up to now resisted making moves to consider how to regulate AI technologies, both at the platform level and at more specific application levels, and some believe that without any teeth, the ideas of safety and quantifying risk are meaningless.
Sunak argued that it’s too early to regulate.
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