Committee calls for bill to address AI threat to human rights

A cross-party group of MPs and peers has identified human rights risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) which existing laws, they argue, are ill-equipped to cover.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) published a report calling for a new bill on AI to "address the scale and seriousness" of such threats.

"Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose," said Alex Sobel MP, the committee's chair.

On Saturday, the head of the US AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, proposed a plan that includes global regulation, industry-wide regulation and independent monitoring of AI models as they are developed.

Amodei urged the pace of development to be slowed down and the bosses of two rival AI firms, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, said they agreed with him.

One human rights concern raised in recent years is that AI can display biases against particular groups if trained on large datasets scraped from the internet which can include racist, sexist and other undesirable material.

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