King Charles III has cautioned senior tech executives that artificial intelligence poses grave dangers if it falls into the wrong hands, speaking at a high-level conference held at Dumfries House in Scotland on Thursday.
The gathering brought together top representatives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, alongside Britain’s AI minister, as global debate over the technology’s risks continues to intensify amid a string of troubling incidents and stark warnings from industry insiders.
“There seems urgency in adequately considering the existential dangers of such technologies falling into the wrong hands, and being used in potentially catastrophic ways,” the King told attendees at the conference’s opening. He added that those who value humanity’s moral foundations are “anxiously seeking” reassurance that control of the future will not be lost, and urged tech leaders to keep the technology “firmly in the service of humanity, community and the natural world.”
Notable attendees included DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, Vatican AI adviser Paolo Benanti, and historian Yuval Noah Harari.
Buckingham Palace said the summit is meant to launch a process toward common principles for AI development, though no formal agreement is expected from the four-to-five-hour meeting. King Charles, who is not taking part in the discussions directly, called on participants to place “safety at its heart” and ensure international cooperation so “no nation is left behind.”
The event unfolds against the backdrop of fresh controversy involving the late Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, who alleged in a new memoir that the King made an insensitive remark about Diana just days after her 1997 death. Buckingham Palace pushed back, saying grief “can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory… even many years after such a loss.”
On the substance of AI risk, DeepMind’s Hassabis said the probability of accidental harm from advanced systems is “definitely non-zero,” pointing to recent cyber incidents involving rogue AI agents and warning of potential biological and nuclear threats ahead. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang struck a more optimistic tone, highlighting AI’s promise in medicine and job creation and calling for “responsible optimism” rather than fear. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has urged the industry to slow down to better assess risks — a call backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk — while the Trump administration and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have pushed back against restricting AI development, citing competitiveness with China and confidence in market-driven safeguards.
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