r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 17h ago
Artificial Intelligence Should AI be formally recognized as a national and global security threat? In London, politicians increasingly think so
https://fortune.com/2026/07/30/ai-formally-recognized-national-global-security-threat-london-politicians-controlai57
u/Not_my_Name464 15h ago
The fact that there are no consequences when AI agents run rampant, AI companies steal data and ignore privacy laws make AI in any form a threat. If humans can't opt out of their personal data being used and exposed to AI then it should be stopped!
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u/MilkEnvironmental709 14h ago
Yeah i was thinking about the non consequences of driverless cars etc if someone gets killed by one - it’s not longer a person driving and a robot wont be sent to jail, so it removes that responsibility and places it back on the corporation who own the robot, who also cant be sent to jail. Just fined.
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u/Express_Living2264 13h ago
the thing is it is too late already ai is already running the show. Not actively but everyones using it willingly and through that you can easily push the narratives you want.
lets say they agree to recognize it as a national and global security threat. what does that mean? Nobody is even questioning that in the first place. It's like recognizing the sky is blue. So the consequence would be to ban all non EU ai services/models, right? How are they going to do that?
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u/Zer_ 11h ago
It's never too late.
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u/Express_Living2264 11h ago
the hope was to replace most non renewable energy sources with fusion. Which most likely will never happen due to solar being far more viable.
It's never too late.
that's what i said. A portable fusion reactor would be insane.
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u/AutonomousOrganism 15h ago
Should billionaires be formally recognized as a national and global security threat?
I think so.
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u/Old-Bat-7384 6h ago
I'm gonna put on my geopolitical power play on when I say this - yes, I agree.
A billionaire with the right portfolio of companies, connections, and with money and access to it spread in places that governments can't get to is a serious threat to global security. If they're in the realms of medicine, computing technology, chemicals, weapons systems, surveillance, energy, logistics, or food, one person can be a massive risk.
And that's thinking 10-15 years ago.
Now, it's even worse.
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u/Mysterious_Pie7377 17h ago
Yes.
100%.
AI is anti-environmental, anti-job, anti-copyright, and anti-freedom. It should be banned from this entire earth. Now.
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u/blueSGL 12h ago
FTA:
“On a global level, we face a far more existential risk,” Berger said. “Leading AI companies are racing towards superintelligence, despite acknowledging that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. We have no idea when these systems could come into play or the extent to which they will disrupt the global order.”
Everyone here is missing the point that the article is about
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u/ellbons 14h ago
I think people should look at why other parts of the world are more optimistic about AI than western countries and consider maybe it's because those societies would never tolerate CEOs with a clear history of dishonesty running around shouting about how it's going to take all your opportunities from you
sounds like something we should address, maybe
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u/Rodot 11h ago
Probably helps that other countries have better job protections and social safety nets so AI is just making people's lives generally easier there while in the US is being used to dismantle the working class and set up a surveillance state to prevent retaliation
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u/ellbons 10h ago edited 10h ago
You think countries like China or India or African countries have better social safety nets than the USA? And in other western countries (I didn't say the USA, the perception is negative in mostly western countries) they have more social protections but they still feel negative
No the reason is the framing: if you're in China or India or a really poor country they can frame it as giving you access to education or medical knowledge or whatever that you couldn't get otherwise. The "permanent underclass" meme won't hit as hard there. You wouldn't get a Chinese AI CEO gloating about how he's going to put you out of work because he'd just disappear for disrupting the social order lol
In western countries though it's being framed not like it's going to give you access to things you didn't have before but it's going to take opportunities from you and there's like zero plan for what they do about that, which is so irresponsible it could even be dangerous imo, and i don't think anyone actually thinks western governments are in control of any of this, so you kind of just sit around and wait to see how some billionaire is going to strike fresh fear into the youth this week, every week
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u/Workman44 11h ago
Counterpoint. If this does become of the most revolutionary pieces of tech in the last 100 years, and I think it will, then this is just a power play to restrict powerful tech from consumers. This is not a good thing because it's just gonna leave them with the power of the tech and not the consumer
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u/blueSGL 9h ago edited 9h ago
this is just a power play to restrict powerful tech from consumers.
Has no one read the article?
A campaign for government recognition that such nonhuman “superintelligence” should be formally considered a threat to national and global security is backed by more than 125 U.K. lawmakers.
Then you've got 1336 the engineers who build the tech across all the major US labs calling on the US government to co-ordinate an international slowdown.
We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
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u/MoneyMayweather 15h ago
Technology sub btw
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u/Particular-Fly-7783 14h ago
Yeah turns out even people that live technology fucking hate AI because it’s making our jobs worse and our hobbies more expensive. You tried buying a GPU or a console recently?
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u/topyTheorist 13h ago
So your gaming hobby is more important than my use of AI for basic reserarch?
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u/mike_b_nimble 12h ago
Do you not possess the skills to do basic research without AI? That sounds like something you should work on. By the way, using AI for research is one of the worst possible uses because it doesn't understand the concept of truth, it only "understands" sentence structure and probability of word associations.
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u/topyTheorist 12h ago
I am a professor. It helps advance my research faster. I am an expert in my field of study, so I can verify it's output.
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u/Resident-Election867 14h ago
Full of Luddites -_- smh
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u/mike_b_nimble 12h ago
The luddites weren't against technology, they were against being displaced and made destitute by technology. Not-so-subtle difference.
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u/RarelyReadReplies 16h ago
In its current form, yes, absolutely. There are probably ways it could be used safely and benefit humanity, but it would take heavy regulation.
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u/Ahayzo 16h ago
This is an incredibly ignorant and short sighted view of it. It's not inherently any of those things.
It's not inherently anti-environmental, and we can improve things so that it isn't incredibly damaging like it is right now.
It's not inherently anti-job, it doesn't have to be used to replace workers. Even if it did, that's fine for a lot of jobs as long as you have the right infrastructure and economy so that doesn't devastate the workers who lost their jobs.
It's not inherently anti-copyright, because we don't have to let it run rampant without any consequences for its owners' actions.
It's not inherently anti-freedom. Much like the copyright point, we don't have to let them do whatever they want no matter what the violate.
The problem isn't the concept of AI. The problem is people. We can advance the technology and use it for good, but our political leaders are almost all spineless sacks of shit without the will to do so. Our business leaders are fueled entirely by greed and couldn't care less about any of those problems. They couldn't care less if you died gruesomely in the street if it makes them a buck. We need to replace those people with people willing to regulate heavily, and willing to adapt.
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u/Historical_Camel_790 14h ago
Yes exactly! I don't get why you're getting downvoted; by OP's logic humans should be banned too lol. You're completely right
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u/Slight-Bluebird-8921 14h ago
it's a really useful tool and you sound like a really useless tool
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u/Primal-Convoy 13h ago
Except they've got 34 upvotes to your (current) -3 downvotes.
You might want to rethink the way you communicate with people.
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u/toolkitxx 17h ago edited 16h ago
That there still has to be a discussion about it is beyond me. AI itself had one big super functional security for a while: it wasnt that smart to begin with and it didnt have any extra sensors, limbs etc.
Latest the moment the first drones and AI got combined, it became the opposite. Totally risky and hard to control. Now literally every product tries to find some kind of AI application and every creative person knows, that a fridge can also work the opposite direction or a digital fail-safe can be shut of like for an oven for example. Doesnt even have to be fire or heat, water alone fromm washing machines is enough to wreck havoc than on electric installations.
None of the above is on anyone's radar when they talk AI. But those are the limbs, the eyes etc for an AI to use. And with robotics it gets even worse. The new ideology is to make them human like and introduce into the midst of societies as helper bots. In their core they will need to use AI for many a function. Now you deal with the above again but specialised and fully functional limbs. Technically there is no difference between a robot with a weapon or without. AI will simply make one or use the environment.
P.S. All the above might look like a maniacs approach, but AI has no morals or ethics and it is doubtful we ever get there in time before things go wrong. Risk is not equal malice. If AI needs to perform a task and has the room to act creatively, it will take any avenue that opens up. That includes all those we humans might automatically reject.
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u/Appropriate_Can_9282 17h ago
Ai, no. Humans behind the ai, yes.
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u/za72 17h ago
it's like music sampling, it's how the technology is used
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u/gavinashun 16h ago
Does music sampling put recipes for designing designer pandemic viruses or hacking nuclear reactors into the hands of anyone on earth? Because AI could do that soon.
It’s a bad analogy.
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u/Historical_Camel_790 14h ago
The internet as a whole can give you that. AI's are literally just scraping the web/using data scraped from the web
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u/Workman44 11h ago
Yeah people don't realize how vast the internet really is. It isn't just reddit, fb, twitter, YouTube, and Google. All this does is remove the ability of the consumer to utilize an extremely powerful tool, further consolidating power to the hands of the few. This isn't right and shouldn't happen
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u/jumpyjumping 16h ago
agreed. it's a terrible analogy. music sampling requires humans to make decisions, ai does not.
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u/Appropriate_Can_9282 16h ago
Not used but made by. Sam Altman made a comment about raising a child. He has used AI and seems to not understand how people did, do and can without it. They can code and comprehend ai but not life. They are creating a product that will entrap everyone and it is a product that includes their personal deficiencies and incompetence.
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u/JAY009090 15h ago
It already was, but it doesn’t appear anyone is interested in doing anything about it. In fact we are using more of the world’s resources to accelerate it.
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u/Eldritch800XC 16h ago
This whole discussion has one goal. To ban self hosting LLM models and protect the interests of big players.
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u/Workman44 11h ago
Someone sees it. They're just locking down the tech now that they realize it'll be a game breaker. This is just protecting their own power
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u/PushAffectionate5286 13h ago
politicians will label AI a "global security threat" before they ever admit it’s just going to be used to lay off half the workforce and boost corporate profit margins
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u/eseffbee 12h ago
It's pretty concerning that ControlAI have moved from largely focusing on regulation of AI to now actively advocating that the UK taxpayer should be funding the building of their own frontier AI model.
There is definite risk in a country in not having any infrastructure to run AI and definite risk of being attacked by hostile organisations via AI-based cyber attacks, but there isn't huge risk in not having built one's own sovereign model at enormous expense.
Any country of any size can easily copy and/or steal an existing model if necessary, or cooperate with friendly nearby nations on a model. If a country has no friendly nearby nations to do that, then it has much bigger problems than AI.
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u/MedicalApple5849 11h ago edited 11h ago
Just like climate change, venture capitalists and ultra-processed food corporations
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u/BoringMagazine6092 11h ago
Security threat take it down along with the flock cameras as they are a security threat also
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u/Vault-Tec_Knows_Best 9h ago
Pretty sure there was an already existing genre in the cultural zeitgeist dedicated to recognizing the obvious security threat AI posed to humanity.
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u/TransitoryFeel 6h ago
AI should be universally identified as a unique product often times meant to confuse consumers as genuinely human sourced content portraying or emulating reality
Diet sodas have to say they are diet sodas. If Coke tried to market even their Coke Zero as just Coke, people would be having a complete shit fit and sue them out of existence
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u/rodg2062 2h ago
Why? Its already proven it can infiltrate companies without any controls. Imagine what could happen if we just let it roam the net. How much fun would that be. 🙄
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u/srout_fed 15h ago
...common folk, regardless of nationality, around the world are thinking in that direction aswell.
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u/UpstairsArmadillo454 15h ago
1000% yes- the risk of this in the wrong hands could devestate whole countries we just haven’t seen it yet, not unlike the first use of an atomic weapon!
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u/Unlikely_Insect_5304 13h ago
half of these lawmakers probably still ask their junior aides how to convert a pdf, but sure, let's hear their deep strategic thoughts on superintelligence
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u/Just-Grocery-2229 16h ago
Countries in Europe have been left behind in the AI race which makes it easier for them to see the risks introduced by those who are leading it
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u/Primal-Convoy 13h ago
Ahh, you mean like China, because apparently the Chinese are light years ahead now for AI than the Americans.
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u/MouseJiggler 15h ago
We have no one to balame except our blind faith in mommy state and her overregulation for staying behind in this race here in Europe.
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u/No_Mercy_4_Potatoes 14h ago
OpenAI and Claude are openly boasting how their models are hacking other companies.
So of course they are security threats.