UK Attorney General Warns AI Regulation Gap Poses Existential Risk
Former UK AG Richard Hermer calls AI an existential threat demanding urgent international regulation and public debate before a narrow window closes.
Richard Hermer, who served as the United Kingdom's attorney general for two years, is calling artificial intelligence an existential threat to humanity — one that surpasses terrorism, nuclear proliferation and climate change in urgency and scale. Writing in The Guardian, Hermer argues that a narrow window remains to bring frontier AI under meaningful legal control, and that failure to act swiftly could permanently cede the future to forces beyond democratic accountability.
Hermer draws on his national security background to frame the stakes, noting that traditional threats such as armed conflict and financial instability are grave but manageable given existing intelligence and defense infrastructure. AI, he contends, is categorically different: its risks are harder to quantify, faster-moving and less amenable to conventional countermeasures. The comparison he reaches for is regulatory absurdity — that household appliances face stricter oversight than some of the most powerful AI systems on Earth.
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The essay points to two recent events as inflection points that finally pushed the issue into mainstream discourse: the disclosure of the Hugging Face security breach and the high-profile resignation of Jacob Coxon from AI safety-focused company Anthropic. Hermer treats both incidents as a rare opening for policymakers and the public to demand accountability from an industry that has largely self-regulated.
Hermer's central prescription is a push for accelerated international coordination to govern so-called frontier AI — the most capable and potentially dangerous large-scale models. He is equally insistent that this debate must not be left solely to the United States, China and major technology corporations. Broad public engagement, he argues, is essential to ensure AI development serves humanity broadly rather than concentrating power among a small number of actors.
Continue reading at Business | The Guardian.
