Transparency Seems to Die a Death at the Government’s AI Summit

The Government is hosting a high-profile, much advertised AI Safety Summit in November. Among those rumoured to be attending are King Charles, alongside Justin Trudeau, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, and Kamala Harris. 

But beyond media speculation and the bare-bones programme summary (released just last week), there is no clarity on the list of attendees, exact agenda, expected policy outcomes – and seemingly no way to find out.

The Government claims that the summit “will bring together key countries, as well as leading technology organisations, academia and civil society to inform rapid national and international action at the frontier of artificial intelligence”. 

In reality, the summit seems to have been hijacked by Big Tech players, and there is no transparency around the tech industry’s role and influence in the summit. Efforts by The Citizens – a non-profit working in the space of democracy, data rights and disinformation – to find out, have come to no fruition.

“Following the organisers of the summit and their statements, it has been clear that it would be government officials and the top representatives from AI companies [at the summit],” said Abigail Burke, policy manager for data rights and privacy at Open Rights Group, a UK-based data rights organisation.

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Profiteers Dominate

The Government has not made the list of 100 attendees it has chosen for the summit publicly available. And our efforts to extract the list from the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), for a supposedly landmark global event happening in two weeks, has led us nowhere.

“As is entirely normal for summits of this nature, we do not confirm attendees this far in advance”, is what we have been told after several attempts at following up with DSIT. 

According to media reports, DeepMind and Anthropic have confirmed their participation in the summit. DeepMind is Google’s AI lab, and Anthropic is an American AI company that is building Claude, a chat box rival to ChatGPT. Along with them, OpenAI and even the very controversial Palantir seem to have a seat at the table. 

Palantir is the US tech firm that is set to win the £480 million contract with NHS for building a federated data platform, which has already caused much uproar as campaigners draw attention to the company’s history with shady surveillance. 

And if you are wondering what other Big Tech companies we are talking about besides Google, a reminder that Amazon is about to invest billions in Anthropic and Microsoft is already investing $10 billion in OpenAI. 

So, while the Government has cosied up with these AI labs and associated Big Tech companies — placing tech executives at the table with world leaders at this summit, and inviting DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI to work with the Government’s newly created Frontier AI Taskforce — civil society presence is limited at best. 

As we understand from the press releases and meagre guidance published online, while there is some planned civil society involvement on day one of the summit, alongside technology sector leaders, day two will be a meeting with the Prime Minister and only involve “a small group of governments, companies and experts”. This is a key debate with the potential to influence international policy and, as far as we can tell, civil society won’t be included. 

But alongside the opaqueness surrounding the attendees, the objectives outlined for the summit are also vague. The Government has provided no explanation as to why existential risk in relation to “biosecurity” and “cybersecurity” have been made the focus.

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Skewed Topics

In contrast, more immediate risks surrounding the information ecosystem (such as the threat of misinformation factories and deepfakes), the integrity of democratic systems, and ongoing concerns about privacy and safety of citizens in the context of AI-driven technology (for example, concerns regarding the blanket use of AI-powered facial recognition in policing) – all seem to take second billing, if they feature at all.

Elaborating her concerns on the existential, long-termist tone of this summit, Burke said that tech companies “create and profit from [AI] systems”. So with their overpowering involvement at the summit, “not only would the discussion be skewed, but they also have a really vested interest in punting the discussions about AI risks and harms to the theoretical future rather than looking at risks that are happening here and now”. 

“I think the inclusion of [Big Tech] companies and the lack of transparency about the full list, as well as the fact that we know that a lot of grassroots groups and activists have not been invited, speaks volumes about whose voices the government thinks matter and what harms t