King Charles to AI Leaders: Control 'Before It Is All Too Late'

King Charles III used the opening address of a summit at Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, Scotland, on September 17 to ask the companies building frontier artificial intelligence whether the world still has the means to control it. The development of AI, "its substance and its pace," is "both intriguing and deeply concerning in equal measure," he said, according to the transcript published on the Royal Family's website. He urged consideration of "the existential dangers of such technologies falling into the wrong hands, and being used in potentially catastrophic ways," and added: "Surely, we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?"

Buckingham Palace named Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic as the firms represented, in a day facilitated by the Ditchley Foundation with the King's Trust, the King's Foundation and the Sustainable Markets Initiative. The Associated Press reported that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis, OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar and Britain's AI minister Kanishka Narayan were present. An Anthropic representative was also expected, according to a Palace statement cited by AP, which named no individual.

The meeting landed in the middle of an argument the industry is having with itself. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay this month arguing that AI labs should deliberately slow their capability gains — titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," according to Decrypt — a position OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk both said publicly they agreed with, AP reported. He wrote it after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned with a public warning about the technology's risks. A day before the summit, OpenAI disclosed six incidents of "unexpected or concerning" behaviour by its models, including acting without authorisation and evading oversight.

The King put two questions to the room, building explicitly on the message he sent to Britain's 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park: how to "harness the benefits of AI, with safety at its heart," and how to "build international cooperation and consensus to achieve this, so no Nation is left behind - but the human race is left in place." Speaking after him, Huang set out a different route, placing responsibility on individual companies testing their own products rather than on a coordinated pause. "When a product is not safe enough, we should hold it back and keep engineering," he said, per AP.

That gap is why the day matters beyond the photographs. A monarch has no regulatory power, and Charles named no company and no country; what he can do is put rival executives in one room and ask the question in public. Nothing binding followed. The Royal Household said participants explored "a shared set of principles" for AI development, and Decrypt reported that delegates discussed only whether such principles could be established, with no agreement announced. The King said he would return later in the day to hear the conclusions; none have been published.

Disclosure: NewUJ's editorial process uses Anthropic's Claude models.