Microsoft president Brad Smith has called on governments and artificial intelligence (AI) firms to work together to implement safety in AI systems. He believes the pace of AI development is moving forward faster than the ability of AI safety to keep up.
Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Smith said: “Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI. Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection. We know how to do this for other products. We should build on that knowledge and start to think about how to apply it to AI.”
He urged AI firms to build on knowledge of safety and apply this to AI systems. “You often get your best work done, especially on something like a safety break, for example, when the industry itself starts to develop common standards,” Smith told the Today programme.
He said this requires identifying best practices and developing standards, which regulators can adopt to put in place a legal obligation for compliance.
For Smith, the UK is well placed to advance AI safety standards thanks to the AI Safety Institute. “I actually think the country and the government that is in the best position to advance AI safety standards and even rules is the United Kingdom and the AI Security Institute,” he said. “You need capability to do this well and you need to have trained people.”
Smith’s comments on the UK’s AI safety readiness preceded the UK government’s announcement to strengthen government cyber defences. Speaking at Imperial College London’s science and tech incubator, Base One, AI minister Kanishka Narayan argued for a whole-society approach to resilience in the face of emerging AI risks, so that this technology continues to serve British people’s interests and boost our prosperity, as well as our security.
He warned that as frontier AI systems become increasingly powerful and capable of acting autonomously, the potential consequences of failures or malicious use could become far more serious. Narayan argued that Britain needs to act now to strengthen its defences and prepare for future serious incidents. “I want Britain to become one of the hardest countries in the world to attack using artificial intelligence,” he said.
Narayan said the government plans to use every power at its disposal to reduce the risk of AI causing serious incidents, including legislation and working with the industry and academia.
“We will legislate wherever necessary,” he said. “And we won’t look to law alone. We will look to British ingenuity: our scientific expertise, technological capabilities and institutions to understand these increasingly powerful systems.”
The National Cyber Security Centre and the AI Security Institute are actively investigating how to respond to incidents involving AI agents, which requires new expertise and capabilities. The government also plans to look at how to identify and report on near-miss incidents to ensure lessons can be learned quickly, which it said reduces the risk of future harm.
The government also sees the emerging field of AI verification as an important part of efforts to reduce serious AI risk.
Cyber minister Liz Lloyd said: “Through scaling up projects piloting AI to protect public services and progressing a Cyber Bill to boost our defences, the government is putting cyber security and AI preparedness at the heart of the UK’s digital future.”
