EU steps up AI safety push with frontier labs talks

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday announced the plans of hosting main frontier AI labs and the talks will be aimed at discussing efforts to tackle the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

"I will invite ​the main frontier labs for a discussion on ​how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier," ‌Von ⁠der Leyen told EU lawmakers.

As Anthropic and OpenAI push the boundaries as the world's leading frontier labs, building increasingly powerful and cutting-edge artificial intelligence, a growing faction of researchers is urging the industry to slow down.

Meanwhile, EU leadership, including Ursula von der Leyen, maintains that the bloc's landmark artificial intelligence regulations position Europe to take the global lead in managing these emerging risks.

The EU president also called for international collaboration on testing and evaluating frontier AI models. It is also expected that she will extend that invitation to Canada and the UK as well.

Her remarks come as the world is in the grip of AI fears stemming from researchers’ warnings who claimed that artificial intelligence is going to wipe out humanity within a decade due to its recursive improvement without human intervention.

Even Anthropic in his detailed essay called for slowing down AI development. His calls were also backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. But the industry is divided on this issue. For instance, Nvidia Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed against these calls.

According to Zuckerberg, “Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.”

Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well, he adds.