UK government rejects 'kill switch' idea for dangerous AI

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 Kokotajlo 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."

Kokotajlo 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 1 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.