Elon Musk says AI Safety Summit aims to establish 'third-party referee'

Tesla and SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk attends the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, Britain on November 1, 2023. The UK Government are hosting the AI Safety Summit bringing together international governments, leading AI companies, civil society groups and experts in research to consider the risks of AI, especially at the frontier of development, and discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action. Leon Neal/Pool via REUTERS

BLETCHLEY PARK, England (Reuters) -Elon Musk said on Wednesday an inaugural AI Safety Summit in Britain wanted to establish a "third-party referee" that could oversee companies developing artificial intelligence and sound the alarm if they have concerns.

"What we're really aiming for here is to establish a framework for insight so that there's at least a third-party referee, an independent referee, that can observe what leading AI companies are doing and at least sound the alarm if they have concerns," the billionaire entrepreneur told reporters at Bletchley Park, central England.

"I don't know what necessarily the fair rules are, but you've got to start with insight before you do oversight," Musk said.

Musk's comments came after Britain published a declaration signed by 28 countries and the European Union which set out a two-pronged agenda focused on identifying AI-related risks of shared concern, building the scientific understanding of them and building cross-country policies to mitigate them.

"I think there's a lot of concern among people in the AI field that the government will sort of jump the gun on rules, before knowing what to do," Musk said.

"I think that's unlikely to happen."

(Reporting by William James; editing by Kate Holton and Sachin Ravikumar)