Rishi Sunak’s AI safety summit appears slick – but look closer and alarm bells start ringing | Chris Stokel-Walker

The prime minister wants progress on this tech to be his legacy, but in truth he is failing to equip us for the challenges it brings

The UK's AI safety summit opens at Bletchley Park this week, and is the passion project of Rishi Sunak: a prime minister desperate for a good news story as his government looks down the barrel of a crushing election defeat.

Sunak appears to want progress on AI to become his lasting legacy. Last week, he delivered a speech about the risks of AI if weaponised by terrorists and cybercriminals, and published a series of documents on frontier AI", an industry term for generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. He even unveiled a UK AI safety institute.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of How AI Ate the World, to be published in May 2024