King Charles III of the United Kingdom will meet leaders of major artificial intelligence companies in Scotland. With calls to slow the pace of AI development mounting in the industry, led by Anthropic and OpenAI, the move is seen as an attempt by the British royal family to take the lead in convening the discussion.
Buckingham Palace said the king has invited officials from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic to discuss how to develop and use AI in ways that benefit society, according to The New York Times on the 13th. The gathering, organized by the British nonprofit Ditchley Foundation, will be held on the 17th at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, southwestern Scotland.
Buckingham Palace said the king will discuss how technology can be used for good to support local communities and improve lives. OpenAI said Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar will attend. According to The Guardian, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Father Paolo Benanti, who advises the pope on AI and technology ethics, will also attend.
The British side will include AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, along with officials from the King's Trust, a charity founded by the king, and the Sustainable Markets Initiative, a global network of chief executives.
A royal source told The Independent that the king seeks to convene, listen to and encourage such discussions while posing the question of how AI should be developed for the benefit of humanity. "As King Charles has shown on the environment and water scarcity, he is seeking to provide a neutral venue to energize conversation on global issues that concern us all," the source said.
Leaders and insiders at major AI companies have recently raised a series of concerns about the technology and the pace of its advance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei released a letter the previous day arguing that AI development should be slowed, citing the rapid advance of AI models, including the hacking of an OpenAI AI model on Hugging Face, as a concern. He described the phenomenon as "recursive self-improvement," a term for AI building more capable next-generation AI on its own. Amodei said that if left unchecked, the trend could "outpace our ability to understand and control these systems."
He proposed steps to manage the advance of AI, including stationing outside evaluators at frontier AI companies to monitor progress and having AI companies in democratic countries cooperate on common safety standards. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, also expressed support for the letter released by Amodei.
Officials in President Donald Trump's administration, who see the AI development race as part of the U.S.-China contest for supremacy, reacted sharply to the industry's move. Trump said very negative forces are raising things that will not happen, adding that the United States is leading China in AI and that he wants to keep that position, because whoever wins in AI wins in the end. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said there should be no moratorium on AI technology because China will compete with the United States.
David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, also criticized the effort, saying companies should not pretend they need anyone else's permission and should not act as if their reasons for slowing down are purely altruistic. He warned that they will face significant liability if their products enable serious cyberattacks.
