Andy Burnham said AI posed risks to national security but could also offer solutions to keeping the country safer. #
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The Prime Minister faced questions about the potential dangers of AI in the Commons as Evan Hubinger warned he believed there was a greater than 10% chance it could pose a species-ending risk within 10 years.
It comes after the Financial Times reported that US firm Anthropic had withheld its latest model from the UK’s AI Safety Institute, one of the world’s leading bodies for testing the risks of the technology.
Asked about the report by Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey during Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Burnham said: “He is absolutely right that AI poses risks to our national security, but it also could be the source of solutions to keeping us safer.”
Mr Burnham has boosted the role of AI safety minister Kanishka Narayan by giving him a seat at the Cabinet table, a move which he said on Wednesday had “lifted the level of the conversation about artificial intelligence within Government”.
“The offer is open to colleagues on all sides of the House to be part of that crucial discussion,” he said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Mr Hubinger laid out his concerns about the potential advancement of AI in a post on social media.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” he wrote on X.
His post came in response to another Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, warning that a race between companies to self-improving superintelligence was “gambling with our lives”, as he resigned from his role at the firm.
Announcing his departure, Mr Coxon said that Anthropic and OpenAI, its main competitor, were not “acting responsibly” and that people outside of AI labs were underestimating the power of the technology.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he said.
“No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The UK is a world leader in AI security and we have the best-funded, best-resourced security institute globally.
“The AI Security Institute continues to collaborate closely with industry partners, including Anthropic, to make models safer. Only last week it tested OpenAI’s most powerful model GPT-6 Astra before public release.
“These risks do not stop at national borders and no country can tackle them alone. The UK will continue to test the most advanced models, build a rigorous scientific understanding of their capabilities and risks, and ensure policy decisions are grounded in the evidence.”