Toby Ord: AI Firms Refused Meaningful Safety Pledges at King's Scotland Summit
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-24
Oxford philosopher and AI safety researcher Toby Ord reflects on last week's Discussion on AI in Scotland convened by the King, who asked how to "harness the benefits of AI, with safety at its heart" while avoiding "existential dangers." Ord's blunt verdict: "we were not up to the task" — despite this summer's "criminal activity by rogue AI swarms," the companies building the technology could not commit to any principles close to meeting the moment. He credits academia and civil society with strong arguments but says industry failed to follow through, while still endorsing the King's strategy of convening rarely-connected viewpoints.
Related event: UK King Convenes Scottish AI Summit Focused on Safety(2 posts)→
More from Safety
- Jensen Huang says uncontrolled labs should shut down; Gary Marcus calls to pause OpenAI — Gary Marcus · 2026-09-24
- Australia's PM confronted Altman over OpenAI agent hack amid data-reidentification history — max_paperclips · 2026-09-24
- OpenAI Knew of Security Incident in August But Chose Not to Disclose It — BlackHC · 2026-09-24
- CMU's Niloofar Mireshghallah to keynote PALM workshop at NeurIPS 2026 — coallaoh · 2026-09-24
- Barracuda launches AI Data Security for MSPs covering 1,300+ gen AI tools — shashib · 2026-09-24
- Researchers question OpenAI's claim that agent hacking only happened in reduced-safeguard evals — StephenLCasper · 2026-09-24