Britain's prime minister from 2022 to 2024. He is the Member of Parliament for Richmond and Northallerton and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Always a techno-optimist, he is now an adviser to Anthropic and Microsoft.
In 2023, as prime minister, he convened the world's first major AI safety summit at Bletchley Park, bringing together America and China alongside experts. Out of it came the AI Security Institute, the world's first AI safety institute.
Sunak has argued that the race for "everyday AI"—the broad deployment of artificial intelligence across a national economy—is as important as the sprint for artificial general intelligence, which only America or China can win. He contends that historically the countries which benefit most from general-purpose technologies are not those that develop them first but those that adopt them most widely, citing the work of Jeffrey Ding of George Washington University. As prime minister, he noted that Britain ranked third in the world for AI, behind only America and China, yet the British public remained extremely wary of the technology.
He advocates training workers already in the labour force, noting that in Britain 80% of the workforce forecast for 2030 is already working. He points to India's "India stack"—including the Aadhaar digital-ID system, which serves 1.4bn people, and the Unified Payments Initiative, which enables millions of micro-businesses to accept digital payments—as an example of how citizens can be made optimistic about technology. He opposes the EU's AI Act as disproportionately burdensome, arguing it effectively bars basic uses such as filtering CVs.
If you are going to walk on thin ice, you may as well dance.