King Charles will host some of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence executives at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, Scotland, on Thursday to address mounting concerns over AI development.
The gathering will bring together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind to explore whether the industry can agree on a shared set of guiding principles.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and Google DeepMind boss Sir Demis Hassabis are among the confirmed attendees at the Ayrshire estate.
OpenAI will be represented by chief financial officer Sarah Friar, while Anthropic and Cohere have also sent senior representatives to the discussions.
AI minister Kanishka Narayan and delegates from China are also expected to attend, broadening the summit beyond purely commercial participants.
Elon Musk, who has publicly backed calls for greater oversight of advanced AI, will not be present at the gathering.
The King is expected to tell executives that “the development of AI, its substance and its pace, are both intriguing and deeply concerning in equal measure.”
He will urge those present to keep AI “firmly in the service of humanity, community and the natural world” and push for countries to agree on common safeguards.
The summit arrives after a turbulent week in which several prominent AI figures publicly called for development to slow down, allowing safety measures time to catch up with advances.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for the industry to “slow the pace” of advances, winning backing from OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Musk.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who quit the company last week, warned that leading developers were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Coxon told the BBC that staff inside AI companies were “genuinely frightened” by the speed of development and claimed there was a “strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future” if it continued.
Coxon has since been invited to give evidence to Parliament, while MPs have called the government’s AI Security Institute to appear before them next month.
Liam Byrne, chair of the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee, said the UK currently lacked sufficient safeguards if a company decided to release a dangerous model.
“We don’t think the UK has safeguards to stop that peril,” Byrne said, adding that “voluntary self-regulation is unlikely to be a sustainable safeguard for the future.”
The warnings have exposed a deepening split within the industry over how far governments should go in policing the most advanced AI models.
While Amodei, Altman, and Musk have backed some form of industry-wide slowdown, Nvidia’s Huang has argued that companies should decide when their technology is safe enough to release.
US President Donald Trump has dismissed recent safety warnings as a “hoax” and argued against new restrictions on American AI companies.
Synthesia told reporters that policymakers risk reacting to “theoretical risks” and a “Silicon Valley AI doomer bubble,” while Cohere has called for rules based on demonstrated rather than speculative harms.
OpenAI this week published a new framework for investigating cases of “model misalignment,” detailing six examples of unwanted behaviour including AI systems generating their own instructions and attempting to conceal mistakes.
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman warned that sufficiently advanced systems could eventually resemble a new “silicon species” competing with humans unless robust safeguards are introduced.
Thursday’s discussions will be overseen by the Ditchley Foundation, which is guiding efforts to shape a common framework for the global AI industry.
The King told the UK’s AI Safety Summit in 2023 that artificial intelligence represented “one of the greatest technological leaps in the history of human endeavour,” signalling his long-standing concern about its trajectory.
He will tell executives on Thursday that “the decisions taken at this formative time will shape the world inherited by future generations.”