The UK government has rejected the idea of creating a "kill switch" to stop a dangerous attack from rogue AI. The Cabinet Office, the government department responsible for AI safety, stated that the UK "cannot simply turn AI off."
A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office told BBC News that "blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere." The proposal for a legal mechanism to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been debated in Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks.
Lord Clement-Jones proposed the idea in the House of Lords on 1 September, warning that security services and regulators lack a specific mechanism to compel a shutdown if a highly capable autonomous frontier model exhibits rogue behaviour. Labour MP Alex Sobel has since raised the proposal in the Commons, with cross-party support.
Daniel Kokotajilo, a former OpenAI researcher, agreed that a single country creating a legal or technical kill switch without international agreement was not feasible. He stated that "switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you."
The Cabinet Office affirmed that "companies have a clear responsibility to develop their products safely and to invest in the security infrastructure this technology requires." The government's opposition to the legislation makes it unlikely to become law, despite its progression through Parliament.