Bletchley Park AI summit SITC Chair comment: Serious, near-term AI governance challenges must be addressed with same urgency and unity as ‘frontier’ risks

2 November 2023

Government and tech leaders have been gathering at Bletchley Park for an artificial intelligence (AI) safety summit, which opened with the unveiling of an agreement among 28 countries and the European Union on the need for global action to ensure the safe development of ‘frontier AI’.

In August the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee published an interim report in its major inquiry on AI, which set out 12 key governance challenges that must be addressed before the technology outpaces efforts to regulate and ensure its safe deployment.

Chair's comments

Commenting as the summit closed, Chair of the SITC Rt Hon Greg Clark MP said:

“The Prime Minister has set out his intention for the UK to be a global leader in the safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence, and this successful summit underlines the UK’s convening power.

The Bletchley Declaration correctly identifies potential risks associated with the development of this technology. But existential risk from frontier AI is just one of the 12 governance challenges that our Committee set out, and many of the here and now challenges need an urgent response.

These include the potential for current and future AI applications to exacerbate biases, to fake people’s words, to allow personal data to be identified - as well as the urgent question of whether models should be required to be open source or proprietary.

The Government must address these here-and-now issues as a priority, and its response to my Committee’s interim report on AI - which we expect promptly now this summit has concluded - would be an ideal place to start. We also hope to see an urgent response to the White Paper consultation, which closed in June of this year.

We commend the Government for having successfully organised this summit, and very much hope that it will use it as a springboard to set out a comprehensive direction on the wider and pressing issues, for public confidence in AI to be secured.

We look forward to questioning Michelle Donelan, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology on these and other matters at our hearing next Wednesday 8th November.”

Further information

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