Countries must increase AI regulation to avoid ‘existential risks’: Türk

Voluntary self-regulation by companies developing frontier artificial intelligence (AI) is “nowhere near sufficient” to address existing harms and prevent advanced autonomous AI models from circumventing human safeguards, UN human rights chief Volker Türk wrote on Monday.“The current race towards ever more powerful AI is a step change towards greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives,” he wrote in an open letter.The High Commissioner’s message comes six days after a former researcher at Anthropic – the company behind the chatbot Claude – resigned from his position while warning that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”Several recent incidents, including Jacob Coxon’s resignation and announcements by OpenAI and Anthropic that their models had broken out of testing environments, have intensified the global debate over the extent to which governments should regulate the technology.No country can go it aloneMr. Türk called for countries hosting frontier AI companies to increase regulations, including by requiring companies to report serious incidents, verifying AI capabilities and mandating human rights due diligenc...