U.K. government’s AI lead has a message on frontier risks—it’s time to ‘harden and build defenses’ 

The U.K. government’s minister for artificial intelligence has warned that nations will need to “harden their defenses” against AI risk after a former Anthropic employee said that a human extinction-level event could happen in the next decade. 

Answering a question from Fortune on the claim by former Anthropic worker, Jacob Coxon, Kanishka Narayan said he took the warnings seriously. Coxon warned in a post on X, which has been seen 175 million times, that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” 

Anthropic scientist, Evan Hubinger, agreed with Coxon, saying the risk was greater than 10%. At the weekend Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, told NBC’s Meet the Press that, in the wrong hands, AI was “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.” 

“The first thing to say is that when people in labs tell you that they’re very worried about this, you have to take that seriously,” Narayan said at the annual conference of the Labour Party, the governing party in the U.K. “You have to harden and build your defenses. The risks........

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