As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to progress at a breakneck speed, experts are worried that it could outpace regulations to control it.

Matt Clifford, Rishi Sunak’s adviser on technology, said that unless AI producers are regulated on a global scale, there could be ‘very powerful’ systems that humans could struggle to control.

Even the short-term risks were ‘pretty scary’, he told TalkTV, with AI having the potential to create cyber and biological weapons that could inflict many deaths.

The comments come after a letter backed by dozens of experts, including AI pioneers, was published last week warning that the risks of the technology should be treated with the same urgency as pandemics or nuclear war.

Senior bosses at companies such as Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed the letter along with the so-called ‘godfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton.

Hinton recently resigned from Google and raised warnings about the dangers of AI, saying a part of him now regretted his life’s work.

‘I think the thing to focus on now is how do we make sure that we know how to control these models because right now we don’t.’

The technology expert said AI production needed to be regulated on a global scale and not only by national governments.

AI apps have gone viral online, with users posting fake images of celebrities and politicians, and students using ChatGPT and other language learning models to generate university-grade essays.

But AI can also perform life-saving tasks, such as analysing medical images such as X-rays, scans and ultrasounds, helping doctors to identify and diagnose diseases such as cancer and heart conditions more accurately and quickly.

Clifford said that AI, if harnessed in the right way, could be a force for good.

‘You can imagine AI curing diseases, making the economy more productive, helping us get to a carbon neutral economy,’ he said.

On Tuesday, Clifford tweeted that there was ‘a lot of nuance’ to what he said.

‘Short and long-term risks of AI are real and it’s right to think hard and urgently about mitigating them,’ he said, adding a longer transcript from the interview/

The Labour Party is pushing for ministers to bar technology developers from working on advanced AI tools unless they have been granted a licence.

Shadow digital secretary Lucy Powell, who is due to speak at TechUK’s conference on Tuesday, told The Guardian that AI should be licensed in a similar way to medicines or nuclear power.

‘That is the kind of model we should be thinking about, where you have to have a licence in order to build these models,’ she said.

In May, Sunak held talks with the heads of AI companies like ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind. They discuss the future of artificial intelligence and the threats posed by it.

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