EU lawmakers call for summit on 'very powerful' AI

EU lawmakers urged world leaders on Monday to hold a summit to agree guiding principles for the control and deployment of powerful artificial intelligence, saying it was developing faster than many had expected.

The 12 MEPs, all working on upcoming EU legislation on the technology, said US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen should call the top-level meeting.

The statement came less than three weeks after Twitter owner Elon Musk and more than 1,000 technology figures demanded a six-month pause in the development of systems following in the footsteps of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT.

That open letter, published in March by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), had warned that AI could spread misinformation at an unprecedented rate, and that machines could "outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace" humans, if left unchecked.

The MEPS said they disagreed with some of the FLI message's "more alarmist statements".

"We are nevertheless in agreement with the letter's core message: with the rapid evolution of powerful AI, we see the need for significant political action," they added.

They did not spell out which challenges they saw coming from advanced artificial intelligence applications.

European lawmakers have been working on their own AI Act for the past two years, under which AI tools are expected to be classified according to their perceived level of risk, from low to unacceptable.