TL;DR We should regulate AI development, and emailing your MP with the tool found at https://pauseai.uk/campaigns is the best place to start - it takes just a few minutes, and is significantly impactful.
As AIs grow exponentially quickly, we might hope that they stay well-behaved. After all, they are getting powerful enough to come up with thousands of “zero-days” - previously undiscovered bugs and exploits in different systems. So, how well behaved are they?
It’s not easy to measure behavior, but we have a way of measuring AI capabilities, the METR graph. Well… OpenAI’s new model, GPT-5.6 Sol, does not appear on the METR graph because it cheated so much that it could not be assigned a meaningful score. This does not bode well. An AI that cheats is an AI that is more likely to act misaligned (e.g. hacking into a bank, or starting a pandemic) in order to fulfil the user’s request.
You might share my worry, and wonder what regulations the government has put in place to hold these companies accountable for any harm their models could cause. Unfortunately, I have some more bad news.
The UK has no specific legal standards for AI. No regulator oversees frontier AI development. And UK law does not reliably hold developers liable for damage or deaths caused by their models, even when the danger is predictable, preventable and uniquely enabled by AI. In short, UK law neither requires developers to guard against frontier AI risks, nor exposes them to any financial consequence if they fail to do so. (PauseAI)
Now, alarm bells should be ringing. What can we do to fix this disaster waiting to happen? Well, there is some good news. The best thing you do in the next 5 minutes is to email your MP. Legislation is likely the only way we can stop these huge companies from spending billions on datacentres to make ever more risky AI. You can directly apply pressure towards making this happen - the more constituents that email their MP, the more likely the MP is to engage in legislative talks, and the more likely we are to have something stopping this reckless AI development.
PauseAI have a great email template that finds your MP, and makes sure your email will get through. If you want to make the world a safer and better place, this is genuinely one of the best things to do. You should also encourage your similarly concerned friends to follow suit!
Thanks for reading.
Lachlan Ewart