Newscast

The broadcast began with the film Artificial, about OpenAI's Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, and framed the AI debate around whether to race ahead or slow down. It reported that, in the week Ukraine attacked Russia's data centres, the UK's AI minister warned that AI-assisted cyber attacks could breach cyber defences, while the head of MI5 said terrorists were seeking to exploit AI and highlighted AI's potential to change the stakes on bioweapons.

A discussion with Roman Yampolskiy, Bernard Marr and Stephanie Hare covered hostile use of AI, superintelligence and containment, and Anthropic's suggestion that AI could enter household appliances. It also covered Ukrainian drone strikes reportedly knocking multiple Yandex data centres offline in Russia—Yandex was described as Russia's equivalent of Google—and whether data centres are becoming as strategically important as power stations, pipelines and communications networks.

The panel then discussed the film's acceleration-versus-caution theme, self-regulation, calls for a UN ban on developing general superintelligence, economic and cybersecurity risks, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella arguing for containment measures and emergency shutdown systems. It also considered whether a genuine off switch for advanced AI is possible, with Roman Yampolskiy arguing that it would not be.