The United States and the United Kingdom have signed a historic agreement on artificial intelligence, becoming the first countries to formally cooperate on how to test and assess the risks of emerging AI models. According to the Financial Times, the agreement, signed yesterday in Washington by the British science minister Michelle Donelan and the US trade secretary Gina Raimondo, establishes how the two governments will share technical knowledge, information and talent on AI security .
The agreement represents the first bilateral agreement on the safety of AI to the world and comes as governments push for greater regulation of the existential risks of new technology, such as its use in malicious cyber attacks or in the design of biological weapons. The agreement will notably allow the UK’s new AI Safety Institute (AISI), created in November, and its US counterpart, which has yet to start its work, to exchange expertise through the secondment of researchers from both the countries. The institutes will also work together on how to independently evaluate private AI models built by companies like OpenAI and Google. The partnership is modeled on that between the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US National Security Agency, which work closely together on intelligence and security matters.