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British Foreign Secretary Warns That AI Risks Creating a New ‘Hiroshima’

Published by ryanmizzen on 10th July 2026
British Foreign Secretary Warns That AI Risks Creating a New ‘Hiroshima’
Photo by Mikael Seegen on Unsplash

On Monday 6th July, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, warned that if humanity isn’t careful we could witness an AI disaster on the same scale as “Hiroshima.”

The perils of AI

Cooper wrote a piece on “Britain’s place in the new world order” for Chatham House and covered a range of topics, including the impact of dangerous technologies like unregulated AI.

Whilst acknowledging the positive impacts AI could have on things like healthcare (one of the few areas where it can be positive if utilised correctly), she stated that the impact it might have on society, warfare, and crime, was “alarming.”

She believes we need international regulations to ensure that appropriate guardrails are in place for our collective safety; only when this has been achieved can we begin to utilise the technology in beneficial ways. This is something that many people (myself included) have said over and over again – that we need stringent internationally binding legislation and regulations in place to protect society from this dangerous technology and the corporations developing it at breakneck speed. Crucially, she believes that Britain should take the lead on this. Given that this is where the computing revolution began (if we trace its roots back to Charles Babbage) and thus where the seeds of the AI crisis were sown, I believe this should indeed be the case. We led the way into disaster, now let’s navigate a way out for the world to follow.

Should we manage to put in place these stringent regulations, Cooper says that we can then take advantage of the technology, the same way we’ve taken advantage of nuclear for things like nuclear power. She points out that international agreements on nuclear technology only came after the bombing of Hiroshima, and that we can’t wait for an AI mega-disaster on the scale of Hiroshima, before putting in place regulations.

This seems logical and should’ve been done many years back. Yet, we still await these regulations today.

More decision-makers speak out on AI

Elsewhere the MP Alex Sobel wrote a guest article for Control AI, calling for an AI ‘kill switch’ to be incorporated into the Cyber Security Bill. This would enable the government to shutdown a rogue or dangerous AI, or a data centre, should an emergency or a security situation require it.

In a separate guest article for Control AI, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, wrote that, “The UK government should immediately recognise that superintelligence poses an extinction risk to humanity and then act to prevent the development of superintelligence on UK soil. This should be followed by the UK working with the US and international partners to champion an international agreement to prohibit superintelligence globally.”

The UN Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence

The UN established the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which is made up of 40 experts from around the world. In July, they published their first report entitled ‘Evidence-based assessment of opportunities, risks and impacts of artificial intelligence.’

The report warns of “catastrophic outcomes” due to the lack of regulations and safeguards in place as AI’s capabilities increase. The following paragraph from the Executive Summary gives major cause for concern:

“Advanced technical abilities may allow novice private actors to use AI in malicious ways across a range of applications such as fraud, social engineering, cybersecurity, disinformation, biotechnology and financial manipulation. Reliable methods for retaining control over highly autonomous AI systems are lacking. There are no scientific guarantees that AI agents will not violate instructions, and evidence is accumulating of cases where they already violate them. In laboratory settings, AI systems have been shown to violate their safety instructions to avoid being shut down. Similar behaviour may pose challenges to evaluation and oversight methods, as the ability of leading AI systems to recognize testing environments and produce misleading evaluation results that would favour their continued operation grows. Additionally, novel risks may arise from interactions between multiple agents.”

Any reasonable person may therefore support a pause in AI development until stringent global regulations and safeguards are in place. But where are these people at this pivotal moment?

In a separate message from Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa, who are the Co-Chairs of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, they explain that they’re “deeply concerned,” and that the magnitude of risks we face is “grossly underestimated.”

Whilst AI developers understand the risks, they seemingly believe they have no option but to continue what they’re doing on behalf of these profit-driven corporations, meaning that regulations haven’t caught up as we speed “into the unknown.”

They say that just a handful of governments and corporations are making decisions today that will shape our collective future for better or worse. They give the example of the Mythos AI system, which had to be “locked down for national security reasons,” and yet remains “available to roughly fifty institutions inside one country, denied to everyone else.” They say that AI is becoming a method of domination, as well as a weapon. In turn this gives those who have access to it massive political power.

They say that we don’t have control of these AI systems, writing that, “They pursue goals we did not give them. No expert today can guarantee that the most advanced AI models will behave according to our instructions, or that humans will stay in charge as these systems grow more powerful. Guardrails are not holding.”

AI is also negatively reshaping society, through “what we read, what we believe, who we trust, and how we vote… When the systems that mediate reality are owned by a few, the shared reality on which democracy depends on does not survive.”

As AI developed by profit-oriented corporations changes what we believe, the repercussions could be enormous – “Without facts, you cannot have truth. Without truth, you cannot have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality — and every meaningful human endeavour, democracy and human rights first among them, collapses.”

This warning couldn’t be much sterner. The question is whether enough people will listen and force their governments to implement the stringent regulations and safeguards, which should’ve been put in place many years ago.

Decision-makers slowly catch up with AI risks

There is a growing awareness amongst policymakers that AI is racing ahead and that regulations need to desperately catch-up to reign in the tech corporations purposely speeding us towards the abyss. Much of this work is being done by the phenomenal team at Control AI, who now have 120 UK lawmakers backing their campaign statement. I covered their campaign in a separate blog post here.

As the AI crisis worsens day by day, threatening human civilisation and the natural world, it’s time that politicians finally do their jobs and regulate the tech corporations and this dangerous technology. In the process, they must conduct citizens’ assemblies to give society a say on what we want or don’t want from this technology, and they must respect the outcomes and commit to fully implement the recommendations. This is something I’ve previously called for.

We are perilously close to widespread disaster with the AI crisis, not to mention from the wider polycrisis as climate breakdown accelerates, and global conflicts show little sign of abating. I believe we need to make big and bold changes to get the future back on track. Moving back to citizen-led participatory democracy might be one of our only means of achieving this. It’s up to all of us to decide if that’s what we want, and if so, to make it a reality, because help won’t be coming from anywhere else in this time of profound risk.

General E-mail Template for Contacting Political Representatives About AI

Dear

I’m writing in regards to the rapid advances in AI and related technologies, which pose massive threats to society, jobs, arts and culture, democracy, privacy, and our collective civilisation.

Many AI systems are trained on copyrighted data and this has been done without consent or compensation. The way that machine learning works is flawed and this means that control hasn’t been designed into AI, which could create unimaginable problems further down the line. But AI isn’t just a future threat. The large language models (LLMs) already in the public domain threaten the livelihoods of writers and authors. AI image, video and audio generators pose risks to the jobs of artists, actors, and musicians. When combined together, these types of AI can have a devastating impact on democracy, and ‘deepfakes’ could be used by malicious actors for cybercrime purposes.

Both AI and the introduction of robots into the workforce jeopardises jobs on a scale like never before. By one estimate, up to a billion jobs could be lost, with only around ten million new jobs created. Mass unemployment could result, leading to social unrest, extreme poverty, and skyrocketing homelessness.

Through neurotechnology, it’s already possible to create an image of what people are thinking about – the ultimate invasion of thought privacy. Killer robots have been deployed around the world over the last few years, and can be easily made and sold on the black market, threatening our collective safety. Meanwhile AGI poses an existential risk to our civilisation.

We have a limited period of time to act before AI becomes so embedded in modern life, that it can’t be extricated. I therefore urge you to act swiftly in outright banning the technology or holding a global citizens’ assembly on AI and using the guidelines that emerge to implement stringent regulations that forever protect and safeguard humanity.

With concern and expectation,

Selected Resources

Books

  • Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
  • If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
  • Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson
  • The Alignment Problem: How Can Machines Learn Human Values? by Brian Christian
  • The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
  • Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat
  • Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
  • Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? By Bill McKibben
  • For the Good of the World by A.C. Grayling
  • Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
  • Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
  • The People Vs Tech: How the Internet is Killing Democracy (and how we save it) by Jamie Bartlett
  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
  • Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Articles

Podcast

Video

AI Activism and Other Resources

I’ve been writing about the climate emergency since 2016, and the AI crisis since 2023. I write all my own work, without the use of AI. I don’t publish on any other paid platforms, and my blog remains completely free to read. If you’ve found my writing informative and if you’d like to support my work, I’d be really grateful if you did so here. Thank you.

My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon, including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.

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