King Charles summons tech bosses to Scotland for urgent AI safety talks
King Charles III has issued a warning out to tech bosses after he summoned them for an urgent meeting in Scotland to discuss the risks surrounding artificial intelligence.
Today (September 17) the Monarch met with senior leaders from AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Nvidia, where he pressed about the ‘existential dangers’.
According to Buckingham Palace, the meeting would be used to suggest how shared principles over the technology could guide its future, ‘not merely as a driver of capability and efficiency, but as a tool that upholds human dignity and contributes to the flourishing of both people and the planet’.
King Charles warns about risk of AI ‘falling into wrong hands’
The discussions took place at King Charles’ estate Dumfries House in Scotland where he told the bosses that there was an ‘urgency’ for considering the dangers of AI falling into the wrong hands and ‘being used in potentially catastrophic ways’.
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He went on to say: “Surely, we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?”
This comes just days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay where he warned that the ‘AI industry should slow down’, adding that AI ‘swarms’ could take over the internet in as soon as six months.
Tech bosses say AI industry needs to slow down
This warning from Amodei was met with support from other figures in the industry, with Elon Musk writing on X, formerly Twitter: “Dario is right.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman added: “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. We’ll have more to share soon.”
Microsoft appears to be making steps towards laying out rules for its AI bots after it published a provisional 38-page 'Code of Conduct' for its future models.
This imposes strict limits on training after a series of rogue AI incidents alarmed industry leaders.
In the Code of Conduct, Microsoft highlights how MAI Models must ‘never resist human interruption, override, correction, or shutdown’.
The rules add: “They will comply with a User’s request to pause, redirect, cancel, or shut down, following any predefined, human-designed safety procedures for warnings, confirmation, or safe stopping. They will not otherwise delay compliance or make human intervention harder.”