Open Sourcing the AI Revolution: Framing the debate on open source, artificial intelligence and regulation

The UK government is this week convening an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, with governments and technology companies from across the globe gathering to consider the challenges of the future of AI governance and regulation. 

Our paper, Open Sourcing the AI Revolution: Framing the debate on open source, artificial intelligence and regulation, which was supported by PwC, goes to the heart of a central challenge of regulating AI: what to do about open source.

We have sought to find consensus and map the true nature of the divisions that exist about how to regulate frontier AI in the context of open source ways of working. The conclusion we have arrived at is that it’s in the interests of the UK’s government, tech sector and civil society to continue the conversation on the effective regulation of artificial intelligence and its openness, and to try to agree on a forward-looking, permissive, regulatory framework with as much urgency as possible.

Going as fast as you can while bringing as many people as possible along may prove a faster course of development than sprinting ahead alone. We hope that these premises can help shape this conversation towards positive outcomes – an approach that we think of as “Pragmatic Accelerationism”: a belief in the positive potential of artificial intelligence models, tempered by an acceptance that risk needs to be managed and public support will be necessary.