Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Politicians don't want to talk about AI Safety anymore; Nvidia lashes out at Biden's last minute export control regime; Microsoft offers lessons from red teaming AI models; We wanted AGI. Did we end up with BSI instead?
Back when I covered finance, traders would talk about whether the markets were “risk off”—fearful of losses and retreating to the safest assets—or “risk on,” pouring money into riskier equities in the hopes of earning big returns. Well, when it comes to AI, 2025 is certainly shaping up as a “risk on” period.
This vibe shift is perhaps most notable in the U.K., where I live. The previous Conservative Party-led British government tried to make a name for itself on AI policy by hosting an international conference aimed at addressing AI’s potential doomsday risks. The AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023 brought together the heads of leading AI companies along with diplomats from 28 nations to discuss a shared approach to identifying AI risks and building mechanisms to prevent them. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also created the world’s first AI Safety Institute to test leading AI models for potential dangers. But yesterday, the Labour Party government of Keir Starmer, which was elected in July, endorsed an “AI Opportunities Action Plan” that is all about how the country can move at speed to embrace AI and hopefully use it to boost Britain’s moribund economy. In fact, in its official announcement, Starmer’s government said the plan “mainlines AI into the veins” of the U.K. economy.
No safe word
The Opportunities Action Plan—which was crafted at the new government’s behest by Matt Clifford, a venture capitalist who also, interestingly, helped the previous Tory government with its AI Safety initiatives, including the Bletchley Summit—talks about AI Safety in just two of its 50 recommendations. Both involve continuing to support the work of the U.K.’s AI Safety Institute in testing powerful AI models for possible dangers.
Instead, the plan pushes for the construction of new data centers in “AI Growth Zones,” and an overhaul of energy policies to ensure they have the electric power they need. Starmer has committed the U.K. to building at least one government-run data center with 100,000 top-of-the-line graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialized chips used for AI applications, by 2030.
Concerns about how to create these massive new data centers without scuppering Britain’s net zero CO2 goals or depleting its groundwater or leaving it without enough power for people’s homes is simply left to a recommendation that the government set out some unspecified plan for avoiding this. It is interesting that the first AI Growth Zone is being positioned next to the U.K.’s experimental fusion reactor—although if the government is counting on fusion to get it out of its sustainability dilemma, that is indeed a risky choice.
Enlisting the government to create data for AI companies
The AI Opportunities Action Plan also recommends that the U.K. gather and consolidate a vast amount of data into a National Data Library that would be available for both researchers and companies to use to train future AI models. The plan calls for the government to look for ways to integrate AI into the provision of public services and into the educational system. The government has also said it will explore changes to the law to make it easier to create large datasets that AI model developers can use without worrying about violating copyright. In fact, the U.K. Copyright Office has already launched a consultation around a proposed rule that would require copyright holders to opt out of having their works used for AI training.
It's obvious why Starmer’s government is embracing all this. The U.K. is in desperate need of economic growth. While the U.S. economy has been humming, with GDP growing 3.1% in the third quarter of last year, the U.K. has been shuffling meekly forward at less than 1%. Labor productivity growth has been especially poor in Britain, which has eked out gains of just 1.7% compared to pre-pandemic levels, while U.S. workers are now 6.7% more productive than pre-2020. Meanwhile, the bond markets have been punishing the Labour government for tax-and-spend policies that traders don’t think will manage to rein in public debt. As a result, they’ve pushed borrowing costs higher, threatening to derail Labour’s entire domestic policy agenda. The only way out of this bind is for Starmer to deliver economic growth—and he is grasping at AI to do it.
Macron wants in on the 'action' too
But Starmer is hardly alone among global politicians suddenly talking more about AI’s potential economic upsides than its existential risks. French President Emmanuel Macron’s government will host the next big diplomatic confab on international AI governance in Paris in a few weeks. The gathering is a successor to the Bletchley Summit. Only rather than calling it an “AI Safety Summit,” the French government is calling the Paris meeting an “AI Action Summit.” (“Action” seems to be the AI buzzword of the day.) And it's notable that the conference will include five tracks—with an emphasis on “public interest AI” and “innovation and culture.” In fact, “global AI governance” is listed last among these tracks and the description of the track mentions risk just once, and safety, not at all.
Meanwhile, the European Union has voiced its concerns about the Biden Administration’s eleventh hour rulemaking on the export of advanced AI technologies, including model weights and, most significantly, cutting-edge GPUs and other AI chips. Those rules allow free export of these technologies to a select group of close U.S. allies, but place most nations in a second tier of countries to which such exports will be limited. This could make it hard for some EU countries to build the huge data centers needed to train and run the most advanced AI models. (My colleague David Meyer has more on this here.) Again, the EU doesn’t want to miss out on the economic opportunities.
Blueprints and Red Flags
In the U.S., OpenAI also just unveiled a document, titled “AI in America,” that the company is calling its “economic blueprint.” Like the U.K. Action Plan, OpenAI is recommending special AI economic zones, where data centers and power plants can be concentrated, and it is calling for the government to digitize more data so that companies can use it to create AI models.
Overall, the blueprint is an effort to lobby against state-by-state regulation of AI and for the federal government to step in with a clear set of guidelines—but, of course, nothing too onerous. “AI in America” leans heavily on an analogy to Britain’s 19th Century “Red Flag Act,” which mandated that early automobiles could travel at no more than four miles per hour and had to always be preceded by a person on foot, carrying a red flag, whose task was to warn horse-traffic (which had priority) and pedestrians of the approaching vehicle. OpenAI argues the act is a classic example of focusing too much on potential harms and over-regulating a new technology, and it says the act hobbled the development of a British auto industry—whereas in the U.S., which had no such rules, automaking thrived.
As with all historical analogies, it’s highly imperfect. But OpenAI may get its wish. Around the world, politicians seem suddenly eager to ditch the red warning flags and open the roads to AI’s speeding onslaught.
With that here’s more AI news.
Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn
