Thirteen Rules: Researchers Say the EU and UK Hold the Levers to Rein In AI

As European and British leaders prepare to meet in Brussels on 20 November for the second EU-UK summit, a group of seventeen researchers has published a white paper arguing that artificial intelligence must be added to the agenda. The announced programme for the summit, hosted by António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen with UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, covers defence, energy, agrifood rules, climate and migration. Yet despite recent reports of AI agents breaking out of their test environments, and an open letter from more than 1,100 industry employees asking governments to apply brakes, the technology is not on the table. The new paper, written by researchers from the universities of Sussex, Cambridge, Bologna, Macerata and Innsbruck, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Max Planck Society, the Hasso Plattner Institute, the German Environment Agency and civil society organisations, contends that the time for AI regulation is now, and that Europe should lead. It sets out thirteen rules that EU and UK governments should advance.

The paper’s central argument is that the public debate has been too narrow. According to Jochen Büttner, coauthor from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the AI debate revolves around safety, and the white paper agrees that red lines on models must be established and that liability for the companies publishing them must be enforced. But, he argues, this focus overlooks the fact that the most widespread harms of AI are fiscal and physical, and that AI companies are already harming people. The document therefore pairs the familiar safety agenda with two domains that regulators have treated far more lightly: the tax code and the environment. Its authors describe a technology sector that rewards the replacement of workers with software and that consumes land, water and fossil energy at a scale that local communities and national regulators are struggling to constrain.