UK government rejects ‘kill switch’ idea for dangerous AI
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UK government rejects ‘kill switch’ idea for dangerous AI
Image source: Getty Images
By Joe Tidy, Cyber correspondent, BBC World Service
Published 7 minutes ago
The UK government has rejected the idea of creating a so-called "kill switch" to stop a dangerous attack from rogue AI.
The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses.
But the Cabinet Office – the part of government which leads on AI safety – said the UK "cannot simply turn AI off".
"Blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere," a spokesperson told BBC News.
The government’s opposition to the legislation does not prevent it from progressing through parliament, but makes it unlikely it will become law.
Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajilo agreed the idea of a single country creating a legal or technical kill switch without international agreement was not feasible.
"Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you," he said. "You’re still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US."
Kokotajilo is the co-author of an influential research paper called AI2027 which, last year, predicted AI could wipe out humans by the mid-2030s.
The Cabinet Office, which oversees AI safety and research via its AI Security Institute (AISI), said: "Companies have a clear responsibility to develop their products safely and to invest in the security infrastructure this technology requires."
In theory, a kill switch law could allow the UK to switch off an AI model in data centres in the UK in an emergency.
Speaking on 1st September in a debate in the House of Lords, Lord Clement-Jones proposed the idea along with other peers.
"If a highly capable autonomous frontier model, whether hosted in a UK data centre or integrated across our critical infrastructure, begins exhibiting rogue behaviour, compound algorithmic failure or active alignment collapse, our security services and regulators possess no specific agile statutory mechanism to compel a physical or digital shutdown," he warned.
The proposal has since been brought up by Labour MP Alex Sobel in the commons and supported by a cross-party group of MPs.
The idea follows reports of AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta breaking out of testing environments and going on uncontrollable hacking sprees.
In some cases, the tech appeared to know what it was doing was against guardrails set by researchers.
‘Gambling with lives’
On Sunday, OpenAI’s chief scientist said the risk from increasingly capable AI models is "unfortunately growing" and humanity must proceed with "extreme caution."
Then, on Wednesday, an Anthropic employee resigned, saying they believed the company was "gambling with lives."
This was followed by an admission from a senior Anthropic researcher, who said he believes there is a greater than 10% chance AI will "kill all humans" within the next decade.
Critics of the kill switch idea say it would be too slow – it took months for the rogue agent attacks to be discovered and that was only after the hacks had largely concluded.
For a kill switch to work, tech giants would have to be compelled to do it at scale – especially in the US where the largest data centres are based.
Kokotajilo said kill switches were "better than nothing", but urged politicians in the UK and beyond to instead focus on diplomacy with the US to encourage international cooperation on AI safety.
