Brad Smith sits down with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to discuss what some are calling the “Mythos Moment” for AI. They explore how leaders can respond as technology moves faster than the systems designed to govern it.
At a moment some are calling the “Mythos Moment” for artificial intelligence, the conversation around technology is shifting in real time. In this episode of Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith sits down with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, now working at the center of global AI policy and innovation, to explore what happens when breakthroughs move faster than the systems built to govern them.
The discussion looks at the risks that could define this era, the policy choices shaping global AI development, and what leaders must do now to build trust while enabling innovation. From cyber threats to economic disruption, this conversation examines what it will take to navigate one of the most consequential technology moments in decades.
Listen to the full episode and join the conversation about how we shape the future of AI responsibly.
RISHI SUNAK: With Mythos, what’s happened is you’ve had a kind of gated release for this thing. Where’s it’s like, “Hang on, there’s some risks here. We can’t just let this thing be released into the world. We need to give defense the time to, to implement everything and get ahead before it’s released. Otherwise, we’re giving the bad guys a head start, essentially.”
INTRO:
That’s Rishi Sunak, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He’s an advisor to both Microsoft and Anthropic, placing him at the center of today’s AI headlines.
Our conversation comes at what The Economist has called the “Mythos Moment”, named for issues raised by Anthropic’s latest model. Mythos is so capable of spotting software vulnerabilities that it’s raising new questions around the responsible release of increasingly powerful AI.
We talk about why cyberattacks are today’s leading AI risks, the changing nature of digital sovereignty, and what AI may mean to your job.
Rishi Sunak, up next on Tools and Weapons.
BRAD SMITH: Rishi, thank you so much for joining me. You’re here at Microsoft for our CEO Summit, and we get to see you more often these days. You’re an advisor to Microsoft. You’re also an advisor to Anthropic. In many ways, I think that is an interesting frame for the conversation.
We’re in the midst of what The Economist has called the “Mythos Moment”, the moment for regulators around the world, for politicians, others, to think about AI and safety arising out of the Anthropic Mythos model. But I think the reason it’s so interesting to get your perspective on this is you were the first leader to bring world leaders together 30 months or so ago in the UK at Bletchley Park. I was there, as were other industry leaders.
Take us back to that first AI summit focusing on safety and security. What was the inspiration of it for you?
RISHI SUNAK: Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Brad. Having been a long-time listener of the podcast, it’s great to be a guest on it, and good to be spending the time with you here, with the team.
And you’re right. Gosh, it feels like a long time ago now, but I had just come to office in Downing Street, Autumn of ‘22. AI had been something that I had thought about, having spent some time in California professionally, and I was keen to make sure that the UK was positioning itself well.
But there was a particular moment that led to the summit, and that was when I had the opportunity to talk to Demis, Dario and Sam, so the people from the three frontier labs, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind. And they came together to Downing Street to see me.
It was, I think, quite rare for the three of them to have done something together.
BRAD SMITH: Interesting.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah, I think the only other time they had been together for something like that had been for a Congressional hearing, from memory. In and of itself, it was an event, but there they were in Downing Street. And they were there because they wanted to really leave two strong messages with me.
The first was that the technology that they’d been working on for a long time was beginning to surprise them in how quickly it was improving. And that was something that had really caught all of them, I think, at the same time by surprise, obviously a very positive development for the good it could do.
But it led to the second thing that they wanted to say to me, which was that with this incredible new technology, like many that have come before, that poses new risks. And you, policy makers, political leaders need to be on top of these things. And we’re here to tell you that they’re coming down the track, and your time in office is going to have to deal with them. And you should really start thinking about them.
And I was pretty struck by that conversation, and we were there in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, and obviously that’s a room with an extraordinary amount of history. You think of the decisions have been made around that green table, decisions to go to war, World War I, World War II. But anyway, here the three of them were, telling me this.
And I went away that night and reflected on what they had said, which really had struck me. And I came back and walked in the next day, and I said to the team, “We need to do something about this.”
BRAD SMITH: Interesting.
RISHI SUNAK: “And we need to get people together. We have G20 summits, G7 summits.” You’ll be familiar with all these summits in Europe.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: I said, “This is of such an importance for the world, and it’s going to be one of the defining forces that is shaping politics, society, economics, over the foreseeable future, we need to have a dedicated forum where world leaders come together to discuss it and start talking about some of these risks, and how to mitigate them.”
We all know that there’s going to be lots of benefits from AI, and we’re focused on that, too, but this is something that we need to do. And we’re going to have to do a little bit differently to these G7 summits, because unlike in the past, whether it’s with nuclear or atomic weapons, which are developed by governments, this technology has been developed by these private companies. So, we’re going to need to have them involved at the summit. And that hadn’t really been done before, but I thought it was important.
And then anyway, everyone got to work, and thanks to people like you being supportive, and others, that led to the summit, the first AI summit at Bletchley Park.
BRAD SMITH: I remember as the months and weeks were approaching for that summit, which was the beginning of November of ‘23, you dispatched some of your key advisors. They literally went around the world. They met with governments. They met with tech companies. I remember sitting down with them here in Redmond.
Did you get any big push back from any quarter about what –
RISHI SUNAK: At that moment, thankfully, not. I mean, interestingly – (laughter) – there was a little bit of pushback internally in the UK, which probably speaks a little bit more to our setup, where unsurprisingly, people were a little bit nervous. Here I was, it was early ‘23, and I was like, great. I want to have this global summit on a topic that no one’s ever had before. And I want all these people in the room, and we need to do it in six months. (Laughter.)
Unsurprisingly, you can imagine a lot of people were like, whoa, in the words of, “Yes, Prime Minister”, “That’s brave, Prime Minister, are you sure about that?” Yeah, there’s a little bit of skepticism or anxiety that we wouldn’t be able to pull this thing off, actually.
But then once we got – I said, “Look, I’m going to champion this. I will talk to my colleagues around the world.” And I was really grateful whether it was actually, President Biden, who, when I came to visit him in D.C., and stayed in D.C., he was very kind to say that he thought the UK was a great place to host this first summit, and that he and the administration were supportive of it and would send the vice president. That was a very helpful development.
My friend and colleague, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission, again, she was very supportive from the beginning, the United Nations. It came together quite well. And the companies, obviously, yours included, here at Microsoft, at the labs, everyone on that side was very keen, because they thought it was necessary. That was all fine.
I’d like to think it was a little bit of a draw to be able to say we were going to do it at Bletchley Park, because obviously, we’re talking to a bunch of people who are really interested in technology.
BRAD SMITH: Say more about Bletchley Park. I mean, it was. I agree it was a draw. I mean, it was special to be there, but for people who are not familiar yet, describe it.
RISHI SUNAK: Bletchley Park has this, rightly, legendary status in British history, because it was where Alan Turing, who many people considered to be one of the founding fathers of computer science, and indeed, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence, the Turing test and other things, where he worked with his colleagues during the World War to break the German codes. And then, very famously, there’s a machine, the Enigma machine, that does all of these things.
And so, that’s why Bletchley Park has this very special status, and lots of other people have passed through there. But it felt an appropriate place to obviously, as we do in Britain, we’re proud of our history and what we’ve contributed, but it felt that actually, it demonstrated we had a heritage and an experience in this particular field that may have been from the past, but we needed to apply that same expertise to the challenges of the future.
And obviously, for all the tech people that were coming, it’s nice to be able to see Alan Turing’s notes and his letters and the machine itself, as they as they pass through. And so, a lot of people enjoyed doing that, but –
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, I’ll say, I will always remember, because the meeting was very well architected, I would say. Day one was a big tent. There were a number of topics, breakouts, and the like. Day two was smaller. And the afternoon of Day two, in particular, was of course, the roundtable of government and technology leaders that you chaired.
But I’ll remember, just before that afternoon meeting started on Day two, you came out and met the folks from the tech sector and walked us around the exhibits to show us basically what had – the machinery, the equipment, the notes that had led to that great technological advance.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah, it was a great plus for me, actually, because I must admit, I hadn’t had the opportunity to have a look around – (laughter) – much before the summit. It was a nice moment for me, actually, just to enjoy a little bit of that history. And I think everyone – it was a nice moment of just not distraction, but it was something to do outside of all those heavy discussions we were having.
But I must say, actually, I credit – I say, I talked about the skepticism, originally, from some of the people about whether we could pull it off. You’re very kind to say I had an amazing team that supported me. And I say, you’re prime minister, you’re running a country. You can announce all these wonderful things. You can make a few important phone calls, but ultimately you’ve got to have a team, your sherpa team, who do exactly as you described. And they just went out and hustled and went on a global tour, visiting every single capital, every single company, talking to them about what we were trying to achieve.
And actually, after I left office and a new government came into power in the UK, one of the things I’m really pleased they did is keep on some of those members of the same team, to maintain that expertise that we’d built and the relationships that had been built, so that the UK could, I guess, retain the reputation that it had built during this time.
But those meetings, and you remember, it was no good just having a talking shop.
BRAD SMITH: Right. You produced something.
RISHI SUNAK: And that was the challenge. And you’ve been to enough of these things. You know how the sausage is made. You want that – I really was keen for this to have an outcome, right –
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: – where countries and companies could come together with a set of agreements. And I must be honest. You never know until you get there, whether that is going to come off and come together. These things are always a little bit last-minute.com with these summits, but my team did a great job.
And we managed to have a set of agreements, which thankfully, I think, have stood the test of time. And we’ll get on to Mythos in a moment, but the most important agreement was that countries would develop the expertise to evaluate models and their capabilities. And that needed to be done independently of the companies, because my view was, you can’t have companies marking their own homework, and that has to be done by democratic institutions that are accountable to their citizens.
On us, as governments, we needed to create those bodies and that expertise, these security institutes. And on the model side, there was an agreement that they would share their models with these institutes before they were deployed, so that they could carry out pre-deployment testing and identify particular security risks in the fields of cyber, bio, nuclear and other areas of national security interest.
And because these were government agencies, they would be able to draw on the resources and knowledge of our security and defense services, which they needed to. And that, to me, felt like the right balance.
And I remember you and I were discussing this at the time, because here we are. We believe in the power of this new technology to drive growth, to raise living standards, to transform public services. We want to be careful that we don’t stifle that at birth.
BRAD SMITH: Right, yeah.
RISHI SUNAK: And governments often, when they get these things wrong, are too heavy handed, too top down. And I wanted to be really careful that we didn’t do that, because I’m a big believer in the promise, but we needed to reassure ourselves that we could talk to our countries and say that our duty is to keep you safe. And we are developing the tools and capabilities to do that. And as new risks present themselves, we will be able to, A, first of all, identify them and then figure out what to do about them.
And that felt, to me, to be the sweet spot between fulfilling our responsibility as leaders to develop this technology responsibly and safely for our citizens, but not being so heavy handed or overbearing that we stopped innovation and growth and all the good things that come with it.
And look, people will have their own views. These judgments are the judgments you make. You’re always trading things off, but to me, it felt like we got the balance right at Bletchley and came together to deliver an agreement that people could all sign up to.
BRAD SMITH: I want to pull on that thread, but before we do, I want to just add one note to one other aspect of what you did at Bletchley Park, because the goal, which you pursued, was to bring the world together, but there were questions and rumblings in some capitals, including Washington, D.C., did it really make sense to invite China? And you invited China, the government of China, not to everything, but to enough of it for them to be heard and to feel comfortable signing the Bletchley Declaration.
What was that like, working through, I think, what was perhaps a diplomatic dance in and of itself?
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah, you’re right. Outside of the main substance of this set of agreements, and getting that right, and getting all the right people there to then agree a sensible set of things, the other big thing was, what do we do about China?
And obviously, there had been tensions already that had crept into the relationship between China and Western countries, Huawei being obviously a case in point, but other things as well. COVID did not help with some of the supply chain issues and the weaponization of supply chains that happened during that. There was already tension in this relationship geopolitically, and a reevaluation in most western capitals about how to engage with China.
I wrestled with this. And in one sense, I think it would have been almost quite easy to say, China don’t need to be here. We’ve got all these disagreements with them, and long list of those. I don’t think most people would have batted an eyelid if we had gone down that path.
BRAD SMITH: I think that’s true.
RISHI SUNAK: I think that probably would have been the path of least resistance, actually, but I wrestled with it a bit. And I spoke to lots of people actually, including the U.S. administration, because I wanted to make sure we were aligned on this. And Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, we were talking through this issue. And also I spoke President Biden about it.
And I think on balance, my pitch to everyone was this, this is happening, obviously in the U.S., but the other superpower where this technology is being developed is China. And that’s a statement of fact, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Whatever we end up doing down the line when it comes to governing AI, making sure it’s being developed responsibly, has to be done, ideally, globally, because this technology doesn’t really respect national borders.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: On balance, it felt to me that we should try and include them in these discussions, and ideally, try and find common ground, because all the same things that I would worry about, actually, whether you’re Chinese leader or any other leader, you would also have concerns about these same things. And you’d think there would be common ground you could find to work together on making sure these risks don’t manifest themselves anywhere and spread.
But, and you’ve touched on this, Brad, in what you said, at the end of the day we do have a different relationship with China. Yes, they were invited. Yes, they participated, but we still had a separate set of sessions for a smaller group of likeminded countries where obviously, there’s a, whether it’s Five Eyes, or other relationships that we have, which are a little bit more closer on these issues.
And that, again, seemed to me to be the right balance. I’m not sure how many things before or afterwards like this there have been, but we had both the U.S. and China sign the same declaration –
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, that’s right.
RISHI SUNAK: – as well as 20+ other countries, which, at the time, given all the other tensions, was not an obvious, not obvious that either side was going to be happy signing something that the other side were happy with, but we managed to find that common ground.
And actually, you and I are talking just on the eve or day of President Trump’s trip to China, and one of the topics that they are purported to be discussing this week, potentially, is AI and how the U.S. and China will think about that issue together.
Look, we don’t know where that’s going to go, obviously, sitting here, you and I, but I think that’s a good thing. I think that dialogue needs to happen. It should happen. Whether it leads to something substantive or not, the jury is out, but the fact that it looks like the dialogue is going to happen is a step forward.
And again, I think that Bletchley Park approach, hopefully has aged well, that that’s where we are again, today, thinking that that’s something that they should be involved in talking to us about it.
BRAD SMITH: It is, I think, a very apt time to focus on what was created and look at it in light of the present day, as we do. I think you framed it well. I mean, it was this notion governments should create the capability to evaluate these models. It takes an institute of some type. It takes hiring capable people. Companies should submit a model before its release so it can be evaluated. The risks should be assessed, and there should be some mechanism to make sure that those risks are managed properly.
I think of Bletchley Park as kickstarting and giving real momentum to that concept. It also gave birth to the almost traveling circus of AI summits, because you started it. (Laughter.)
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: But it went to Korea, and then it went to France. It’s gone to India. That also has a bit of a life of its own. But that third one in France, in Paris in early 2025, produced its own declaration, but neither the U.S. nor the UK signed it.
RISHI SUNAK: No.
BRAD SMITH: Vice President Vance expressed some skepticism about that approach, clearly offering this concern that regulation would slow innovation, and that would slow, among other things, the U.S. and its race for AI, I’ll just say, leadership with China.
That doesn’t look quite the same today after Mythos. We’ll talk about that, but before we get there, how do you read these ensuing 30 months, especially, say the last 15 or so under the new administration in the U.S.?
RISHI SUNAK: Well, I think, first of all, it’s clearly a positive that the summits have continued. And as you said, South Korea, Paris, and you and I were both in India a few months ago –
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: – which was a really important summit in many ways, which I’ll come to. And I think that’s good because, as I said right at the beginning, AI is going to be one of the defining forces shaping all our lives. And so, if you’re a government leader having this opportunity once a year to think about it with your colleagues and with the companies in a dedicated format, I think is necessary.
The fact that it is endured is positive, and it also— I’m actually relatively relaxed that the theme of each summit has been a little different.
BRAD SMITH: That’s true.
RISHI SUNAK: Again, that’s also fine. And this goes back to the India one. It was the first time the summit had been held in a country of the Global South, to use that phrase as shorthand.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: And I thought that was important, because it meant that there was extra focus on something that you spend a lot of your time on and the team at Microsoft do as well, which is how can AI bring benefits to people living in the Global South or in countries that are not advanced, developed, Western economies? What is it going to do in the areas of health care, or education, or agriculture?
And the India summit was brilliant at actually shining a bit of a spotlight on those things. And I know this is a personal passion of yours and the team here, but it was right that we had a summit that actually focused on some of those things.
So, that’s all positive and good, but you’re right. That moment in Paris felt like a slight change away from the agenda that we had had set out at Bletchley. (Laughter.)
And look, what my read of it is, so you had a new administration, and an administration that, I think you summarized it correctly, was more focused on maybe laissez-faire is one approach, but I’d say a view that anything that looked like it was focused on security or safety concerns or responsible development of AI was somehow antithetical to the growth and the opportunities of AI.
And it’s a point of view that I can certainly understand. And I talked right at the beginning about getting that balance right on the regulatory side.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: It’s not a view that I agree with, because for me, these technology developments don’t happen in a vacuum. I think ultimately, and I’ve spent time in Silicon Valley, and I’m a huge believer in the benefits of technology, but ultimately, they have to be deployed in countries where people are democratically elected and answerable to their citizens. And you’ve got to bring your country along with you on these journeys.
And if your citizens don’t think that the technology is being developed responsibly or safely, you’re likely to get a backlash. And if, God forbid, you had a very serious negative incident, it would mean that you had an overreaction and then very cumbersome regulation.
And so, to me, again, talking to the people who are developing the technology, doing the innovation, they never saw that there was a conflict between doing both of these things. And actually, the teams that are working on security and red teaming, the models inside the labs would often come across things that would help the teams who are actually innovating and helping them understand the models better for the next iteration.
So, They didn’t see that as being in conflict. I think it’s definitely necessary, as I said, for if you’re developing these things in a technology – sorry, in a democracy where you need the legitimacy to do so.
I think what had happened is there are certainly some people who looked at that security agenda, and maybe, if I’m looking back and it’s not what we did in the UK, but there were some people who looked at it and used it as a little bit of an opportunity to catch lots of other things that they cared about in the technology space.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah.
RISHI SUNAK: And things that drifted away from just the pure focus on security to other, I would call, slightly more social or socioeconomic issues. And I think that if you’re going to drift into that area, inevitably you’re going to politicize something that, if you’re in the national security space, can often remain bipartisan. And you can get support from a broad swathe of the political spectrum. If you start drifting into the more social questions, social issues, people tend to get into their political camps.
And look, obviously, speaking as someone observing the U.S. scene, rather than in it, it felt to me, there may have been a little bit of that happening. And actually, the agenda, as it was being interpreted in some areas, was too broad. And so, you had a reaction to that, but whatever it was, it did feel like you had this moment where it was, “Well, all of that, we’re not going to do that anymore, and we’re just going to put foot on the gas, race as quickly as we can and not worry about any of this stuff. You guys pipe down. It’s all fine, and off we go.”
And then we’re in this moment now, and that comes back to your point about the Mythos Moment, it seems like the pendulum has swung back.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, it’s interesting. First of all, I think it’s a really important observation you’re offering that if you want to take a large group of people, and for this purpose, we’re talking about, frankly, a significant number of companies and a large number of countries together, and move forward, and you’re trying to balance two goals that can be intention, one being innovation and speed for innovation, and the other is, call it security, the broader you make the agenda, the more topics you add to it, the more difficult you make it to hold a group together.
And I think that contributed, I think it’s fair to say, you’re right, to then what led to this almost pause in the global movement in terms of, at least countries able to work and move together with the United States.
RISHI SUNAK: I think you’re completely right, and you’ve sat in so many of these summits over the last two decades and worked with so many governments. You’ve seen this play out multiple ways, but look, an example of where it didn’t quite go the way it should have gone was in the EU.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: We set out this UK approach, and I was at pains to say, “This new body we’ve set up, this AI security institute, let me be clear, is not a regulator. Actually, it’s a technical body. We’re going to resource it well. It’s going to have excellent people who can keep up with the pace of the labs.” And we set it up a little bit apart from government, so we could operate at that speed, which governments can’t always.
And that was key to buying the trust of the labs to provide their models. And they knew they were working with people who were not using it as a stick to beat them. They were talking to people who were technically at their level, and that was key. And we didn’t pass any new regulation about AI in the UK.
That was my view. I was like, “Look, I want to do this, I want to have this pre-deployment testing, but I’m not going to pass any more rules or laws to stop AI.” Obviously, the EU took a notably different approach.
BRAD SMITH: Passed new regulation of a couple hundred pages.
RISHI SUNAK: Right, and this goes back to what we were saying right at the beginning. You’ve got this brand new technology. Do we really know how it’s going to play out? We’re in such early innings of it. But here is this multi-hundred page, top-down approach.
And I can understand that people think, hang on, if this agenda is going to end up being cover to have regulation like that everywhere, then I’m going to be against that. And that’s not unreasonable, by the way, so much so I think the EU over time, has realized that that approach was not right.
Mario Draghi, who’s written – Mario is a friend of mine, who has written a very comprehensive report on European competitiveness and growth, has spoken about that act, and actually where it needs to be either watered down or paused. And that has gained a lot more acceptance now, but it goes back to what you were saying.
You’ve got to get the balance of these things right. And if you broaden them out, tip too far in one direction, you’re going to lose people. And there’s a good example of that in this case.
BRAD SMITH: Well, I think there’s a couple of interesting threads one then can pull from Mythos itself. The first just relates to the fact that this is a general-purpose model that happens to be extraordinarily good at finding vulnerabilities in software. Anything that it can get in a binary form, and then can decompile into source code, or anything that it can get into source code, it can find bugs that no one has fixed. And hence it can become a cyber weapon, so to speak, for nation states or for ransomware actors.
The second thing that I think is interesting is in the national security community, whether you’re talking about the UK or the U.S. or anywhere else, the culture is very different from, say, a tech company. At a tech company, you get up and you ask, “What can go right today?” (Laughter.) “What can we build, and what will it create that will go right today?” And in the security community, I think people get up and go, “What is going to go wrong today, and how do we prepare for it?”
And in the parade of what could go wrong the last few years, I think people have often started, not inappropriately, by focusing on bioweapons. How could somebody create the next virus that would become the next pandemic? Once in a century is more than enough. Thank you.
RISHI SUNAK: More than enough, thank you. (Laughter.)
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, they could try to use it to create a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb. Here we are, the real issue is cyberattacks. And to me, I think maybe there’s an insight. There are far more people in the world trying to create cyberattacks every day than create viruses or nuclear weapons. (Laughter.)
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah. (Laughter.)
BRAD SMITH: As we just look to the future, it’s always helpful to then take this learning and understand how do we think about different risks. And the risks of cyberattacks is going to be with us, both because of the nation state incentive, but also just the financial criminal activity that results from it.
RISHI SUNAK: And I think, Brad, the fact that you mentioned both of those actors is critical, and it was probably something that I didn’t fully appreciate until I became prime minister. And then, obviously, I’m spending more of my time on national security. And then it really hit home to me, just the sheer scale of the hostile cyber activity that was happening. I think the UK is the country that, after the U.S., experiences the largest number of cyberattacks. And I think you see that in your Microsoft data as well.
BRAD SMITH: Absolutely.
RISHI SUNAK: And I saw that as prime minister in government. And obviously, there are criminal ransomware actors. And you know what? That’s economically disruptive and all sorts of other things, but I’m particularly worried about the nation state actors. And there are a few countries that are particularly responsible for a large volume of some of the hostile cyber activity. And its state backed, state supported.
And again, you see this at Microsoft, and countries like North Korea and elements in China especially, and in Russia. And it’s a form of what we call hybrid warfare, right, in this world where, if you’re looking for things that are asymmetric, that don’t cost you very much, if you’re the attacker, but can have big, disruptive impact for your adversaries, then that’s the asymmetry of it, then cyber ticks that box.
But it’s also quite hard to – well, it’s easy to hide yourself. It’s why someone launches a missile from place A. You can see who’s launched it. You can track it. You know exactly who’s responsible. Cyber is a little bit harder. It’s in the shadows. Obviously, we know where it’s roughly coming from, but it’s a lot harder to very clearly demonstrate that. It works because it gives the bad actors, some deniability, and they can operate in the shadows. It’s, from an adversary perspective, a pretty useful tool.
And to your point, we’ve focused bio and nuclear and all these other things. This is a risk that is already happening today, that we’re dealing with, and what AI does is just considerably lower the barriers to entry –
BRAD SMITH: For sure, right.
RISHI SUNAK: – for this existing thing that is happening already, that we’re dealing with on a pretty industrial scale. We’ve just suddenly got a tool that makes it far easier to automate cyberattacks, to have them happen autonomously, etcetera, etcetera. And that is something that I’d say Mythos has really brought home for all of us.
BRAD SMITH: The other aspect I think it really, frankly, speaks to the vision that you had, but here we are, after people in the United States concluded they didn’t want any regulation that, say, would require that a company submit a model to the government before releasing it, if it was at the frontier, therefore has no law requiring it that it do so, all on the theory that this is what will accelerate innovation has led to a dynamic or Anthropic has, call it, the world’s best AI model, but is not able to release it.
It could. I mean, it could say “Everybody be damned. We’ll get it out there, and if it causes more problems than we think, we’ll ask for forgiveness later.” But in no small measure, because of the power of persuasion from the White House, and I’ll just say, good people stopping to think, never go faster than the speed of thought. (Laughter.) I think that’s one of the principles here.
RISHI SUNAK: (Laughter.) Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: We’re sitting here without clarity, and it may work – clarity about what rules should exist. It may work for the month of May. Anthropic is, I think, letting certain people test it. It’s certainly letting the U.S. government test it, but I don’t know too many people who would say this is an approach that will scale, that will be sustainable, that will just rely on the good –
RISHI SUNAK: Nature of it. (Laughter.)
BRAD SMITH: – nature of people, and the ability of one government to catch something in time and ask someone to stop.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah. (Laughter.)
BRAD SMITH: Does it feel like, wait, maybe we should go back to Bletchley Park a second time and remember what we all were talking about?
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah, I think that is right. Just actually picking on our last little conversation on the cyber side, and why this is so important, is because, as a country, you have lots of bits of critical infrastructure where, if they are the targets of states, not just criminals who are trying to extort money from a private company, but if they start to become targets for state based activity, that obviously is a big problem for you as a leader of a country.
And the worry I often had in government is I was relatively relaxed, not relaxed, but I had confidence that our biggest, most sophisticated banks, or whatever it might be, huge IT departments, big budgets, very sophisticated, they’re probably going to be fine.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: And then you said something similar as well. You don’t have to worry about those people, but it’s all the— whether it’s the smaller financial institutions or the utilities or other bits of critical infrastructure, which, if they were targeted and impacted, would have huge disruptive effects in your country and communities. But those organizations are probably not ones that are used to being at the cutting edge of having to invest in these defenses.
And that’s another area where governments do need to, I think, lean in and make sure that the private sector, because a lot of these bits of critical infrastructure have been privatized, are operating with this appropriate level of cyber defense that they need to, because if something happens, it will be the government that’s carrying the can for the disruption, which brings us to this Mythos situation. What do you do?
And, look, I have to honest. We are, a little bit, all of us learning as we are going.
BRAD SMITH: Right. That’s a very good point.
RISHI SUNAK: And I think we have to be… We should just be open about that, but it does start at a bare minimum, I think, with what we talked about at Bletchley, which is we’ve got to have a threshold for who this applies to, which it’s never going to be perfect, but you can do. And have those organizations, if they’re developing these frontier capabilities, submit them to some technical, authorized expert body which is credible and independent, to provide an assessment of the risks that this model will pose on all the domains, whether it’s cyber bio that we care about.
My instinct is that organization is better off being at least linked to the government, because it gives it democratic legitimacy, but also it then has better access to the security services and defense network, which will know things that private actors would not.
And that seems to me to be the bare minimum, and that we’ve ended up in a place like that, a little bit, with Mythos because of, to your point, the decisions that individual people made. And obviously, I’m an advisor at Anthropic and I would say this, wouldn’t I? But the company itself was willing to have that conversation with the administration.
And then what’s happened is, you’ve had a gated release for this thing, where it’s like, hang on, there’s some risks here. We can’t just let this thing be released into the world. We need to give defense a time to implement everything and get ahead before it’s released. Otherwise, we’re giving the bad guys a head start, essentially. And we’ve ended up in this position.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: But to your point, we haven’t codified it. We haven’t quite specified who does that apply to, what threshold needs to be met, and then who exactly gets access to it or not, who’s making that decision. Those are all conversations that need to be had and need to be worked through in the usual way in the political process, and that’s what you would expect.
And as with all these things, there’ll be tradeoffs and tensions, but it does slightly focus the mind that I hope people realize that we have got to the point where we probably can’t just have an ad hoc approach to this anymore. We do probably need to sit down and have a set of guidelines, guardrails, acknowledging that they are not going to be set in stone forever, because things are moving too quickly, but we’ve got to at least have a framework for how we’re going to deal with this, so that people have a little bit of certainty and reassurance that we have a plan.
And ultimately, citizens will need that. They’ll need to know that – need to be reassured that we have a way to make sure we’re managing the risks, and this is being deployed responsibly.
BRAD SMITH: The other dimension that you clearly pulled out and put before people, quite rightly, I thought, at Bletchley, was there needs to be some mechanism for international coordination. In the absence of that, you put the tech companies and the AI model builders in a, I think, very difficult position of having to go from capital to capital –
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: – go through the same process repeatedly, in all likelihood, end up with outcomes that require them to change their products. You can be Barclays Bank, and you have one model that you’re using in the UK and potentially, a different one in the U.S., and yet you have a common workforce and customers. That also slows innovation and slows productivity growth.
RISHI SUNAK: Yes. Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: And one of the things that we started to study back in 2023 and ‘24 was, what are the models out there for regulatory collaboration? And the one that in some ways spoke to us the most clearly, and certainly spoke the most clearly to me, is for commercial aviation, a system that was created towards the end of World War II.
And the fundamental tenet was you had to go have your new airplane tested and certified somewhere, but there would be a reciprocity regime so you wouldn’t have to get it tested everywhere. And thank goodness, because there’s one thing we know for certain, the plane that you get on in Seattle, and has been –
RISHI SUNAK: It’s the same way as landing in London. (Laughter.)
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, you’re not going to change one thing while it’s in the air. And so, that also started to take root, but if you look at the state of international relations, 2026 looks very different from. 2023, especially on these digital issues, digital sovereignty.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah, yeah.
BRAD SMITH: You have been in the middle of a lot of these conversations. How do you take stock of these changes and what they mean?
RISHI SUNAK: Firstly, you did a lovely job, Brad, of explaining why the cooperation is so important. And my hope was that these AI security institutes would get developed in different countries, which is, to be fair, happening.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah.
RISHI SUNAK: They’re developing in different speeds with different resources, but the idea I always thought was, well, if you had a network of these bodies, and they were cooperating and collaborating with each other, that would allow for this reciprocity where we trust the U.S. Security Institute in the same way that they would trust the UK Security Institute. If they say, it’s fine, it’s fine, and have that equivalence. That was my hope, because otherwise you do end up with this completely fragmented system, which is no good for anybody, and will mean that we slow down all the benefits.
I hope that conversation is happening, but it does play into this broader issue of tech sovereignty. And the reality of the situation is all these frontier models are all developed in the U.S., see a lot of the hyperscaler capacity at which Microsoft is one of U.S. companies, and at a time when technology has become so much more important to not just our economic lives but national security issues, it has caused lots of countries around the world, particularly in Europe, to examine some of the assumptions and dependencies that they have taken for granted over decades, really.
And that is well documented over the last one to two years of certain things that have happened, whether it’s in the transatlantic relationship or more broadly, which has led people to question whether that dependence on a small set of U.S. companies for technology is really sensible or appropriate approach for their country.
And that has posed some really challenging questions, candidly. What it has meant is political leaders, countries have had to really confront across the range of activities that they use technology for, who are they reliant on? Is that appropriate? Are they going to have agency over the things that are important to them if in the absolute worst-case scenario, they can’t rely on a country or a company that is located in a country that might want to leverage that dependency for some reason? And that is the simple question of where we are.
And it’s a strange question to have, because most of us have grown up in an international, geopolitical environment where you wouldn’t have had to think about things like that, and particularly not of countries that you do so much with and cooperate with, the U.S. being an obvious case in point.
But a very live discussion in most European capital certainly is how comfortable or sensible is it for us to be dependent on such a small range of U.S. technology companies, not because we don’t trust those companies, but ultimately they are subject to the U.S. government? And if a government is willing to use, as I said, those dependencies for leverage in some purpose, that is not a situation that sits very comfortable with you if you are running a country.
That is, in a nutshell, opening up the question of, what does it mean to have digital sovereignty in today’s age?
BRAD SMITH: And as you know, at Microsoft, we are a voice for international collaboration, certainly among the broad number of countries that have long been friends or allies, share common values. It’s why, and you were there when we created a big security conference in February, the Trusted Tech Alliance, companies from different sectors of the tech sector, different parts of it, different countries that said, “Here’s common principles that we adhere to, including respect for the rule of law and protection of privacy, but just good governance, transparency and the like.” But we’re having to fight for that principle.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: You, just sort of to hold – to do at least a little bit, to hold a little bit of the world together, and try to remind people, especially, say, across the Atlantic, but also across the Pacific, with Korea, with Japan and other countries, that this ability to use technology for multiple places in a trusted way is, frankly, the bedrock for ensuring we all have access to the world’s best technology.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah. Yeah. (Laughter.)
BRAD SMITH: How do we have –
RISHI SUNAK: How do we get –
BRAD SMITH: Yeah. At some level, I don’t know whether it’s optimist – we should be optimistic or pessimistic. All that matters is that we should be determined. And we are, but what’s our best path for success here?
RISHI SUNAK: Success in that regard? And I think actually, what you said would not – you would not meet any disagreement in most of those European or Pacific capitals. What they would say is that’s great that you say that, but ultimately –
BRAD SMITH: Will, your government?
RISHI SUNAK: – you’re accountable to a government in your own country, and what you can’t guarantee is how they are going to behave in any given situation. And some of the things that have happened over the past 12 to 18 months give us a little bit more concern that they might seek to weaponize or leverage these relationships and dependencies that we have.
So, Thank you for saying all the right things, and more than that, for putting in writing lots of the commitments you will make to us to guarantee access and that we can rely on you as a trusted partner, but you’re not our problem, in a sense. (Laughter.)
And what does that mean? Very, very practically, I think we’ve gone on a little bit of a journey on this and in the wake of, and you and I were, when we were at Davos together, obviously, Greenland was very fresh in everyone’s imagination and what was happening. There was this almost kneejerk response was, say, in Europe, well, the U.S. has a tech stack that’s sovereign. China has a tech stack that’s sovereign. We need to have a tech stack that’s sovereign in Europe.
My view has always been that, arguably not completely possible, even for the U.S. and China, but let’s just accept that it just about is possible for those two places to have a sovereign tech stack. I just don’t think it is realistic or sensible for any other country or entity to think that they can achieve that, to make that an object of policy.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: This idea that you can be completely independent of some reliance on U.S. technology, I just don’t think is a practical way to go about addressing this issue of sovereignty, but clearly, things have changed. And you do need to ensure that you have agency.
So, what does that mean? Well, I think, first of all, it means recognizing that, sure, there are things we can do on sovereignty, but we need to differentiate between data sovereignty and operational sovereignty. This is something, obviously at Microsoft, we deal with a lot on the hyperscaler on the Azure side. It’s like clearly, there’s bits of data that we don’t leave our country and be subject to other countries having access to.
That is a different set of challenges than the operational sovereignty or the famed kill switch, is are we going to be able to rely on these services that we use every single day and use them in the way that we want to? And that is a different type of sovereignty. We need to approach those two questions differently.
The next thing is to accept, okay, probably on both of those, there are things we can do to enhance our sovereignty, to reduce our dependence on a small group of U.S. companies. But if we’re being honest, most of those alternatives come with a cost. There’s no free lunch.
BRAD SMITH: Right.
RISHI SUNAK: If we’re going to dial up the sovereignty side of the scorecard, something else probably is going to dial down. Either it’s going to be a more expensive solution or a slower solution, or a solution that’s not operating at the cutting edge of technology, or a solution that’s more vulnerable to cyberattacks, because we lost all the benefit of the global knowledge that a global hyperscaler has of cyber hostile activity.
It’s, okay, so there’s no free lunch here. If I’m going to dial up sovereignty, something else has got to give. And then, given that, let me look at all my technological activities that I have, whether I’m a country or a company, actually, and be pragmatic about where is it worth paying that extra price, whatever that price is, not just a financial cost.
And there’ll be some activities where actually, having as much sovereignty as possible is the overriding priority. And we’re willing to trade off that against other things. And in other areas, just it’s not worth it. And there’ll be some things in the middle where the data we want to protect, but actually, if we’re using U.S. models, that’s maybe fine. We just need to build our applications in a way that mean we can switch out the models and have some leverage that way.
I think looking at it as a portfolio of activities, and then calibrating where you want to dial up sovereignty and dial up or down the other things is how people are now thinking about it.
And the other little bit of decoder I’d put on it, which is, I guess, maybe less welcome development, but a reality nonetheless, is the recognition around the world that the geopolitical environment has changed. This rules-based order that you spent most of your career in, that I’ve spent most of my career in, is gone. We don’t quite know what’s replacing it, but what we do know is that hard power is back, and that we’re in a world that is more contested.
And if you’re a mid-size country, you may not be able to have a completely sovereign tech stack or supply chain, but what you can credibly do is make yourself not independent but indispensable in particular areas. And that is a strategy that makes more sense for a middle power, is to identify those bits of key supply chains, technology or otherwise, where they can occupy a really important position, a choke point, so to speak, which gives you some leverage.
If we’re in a time when someone is saying, well, I’m going to withhold this from you, you at least have something that you can bring to the table that says, well, if you do that, I can withhold this, this and this from you over here.
And look, I said, is that a welcome development? Probably not, but it’s a reality of where we are. And I said, hard power is back. Leverage matters. And if you’re a mid-size country, that is where policymakers in mid-size countries are now thinking about sovereignty as well. Let me build for myself some hard power leverage. And that is an approach to sovereignty that I think you will hear and see more of, going forward.
BRAD SMITH: And I think to some degree, this speaks to all of these issues. Some ideas will stand the test of time.
RISHI SUNAK: Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: Like the return to Bletchley Park to think about what was discussed there. We may find that some ideas run out of steam, let’s just say, and will be brought back together, but it is a challenging time.
BRAD SMITH: I think we’re going to have to get together again to talk about some more of this, but I don’t want to let you go without asking you a question about one other aspect of what transpired in the UK those two days in November 2023, because I’ll always remember. We all left Bletchley Park. You returned to London. And that evening of the second, you hosted an anticipated fireside chat with Elon Musk.
But there was a moment during that conversation when Elon turned to you and said, “Well with AI in the future, there will be no jobs.”
RISHI SUNAK: (Laughter.) Yeah.
BRAD SMITH: “There will be no need for people to work unless they want to, but that’s not how the economy will work.” And you famously said, “Well, hold on a minute. Work is about purpose,” and all kinds of things. What was your reaction at that moment?
RISHI SUNAK: (Laughter.) Yeah, I remember that was one of the more stressful jobs I had as prime minister, because that whole discussion was livestreamed, I think, on X. And I think credit to Elon on that whole topic of AI security. He was very engaged. I think you remember, he came to the summit.
BRAD SMITH: Yep, absolutely.
RISHI SUNAK: He wore his lanyard and participated like everyone else and was very thoughtful and constructive about these topics that you and I have been discussing over the podcast. And so, I was grateful that he participated. And this jobs question, I think since then, has probably taken even more of a front seat in people’s minds.
And look, we have to do the quick version, because I know we’re close to time. History would tell us that these things work out okay. Every previous technology cycle has meant that, actually, over time, some jobs go but lots more new ones get created. MIT, as you and I have discussed, have done lots of work on this. Most of the jobs that we know today didn’t exist 50 years ago.
I think someone said it, actually, prediction that technology is going to lead to job losses have a long history and a poor track record. You’d start there, and I would want that to be true.
Having said that, the most dangerous words in the English language are, “this time is different.” It does feel like there are plausible reasons that this time might be different. And that’s because the speed at which AI is being deployed, how quickly it is getting to bits of our economy, and the number in the – you see that how quickly it takes to get to 100 million users. It took, whatever, electricity in the telephone 50-70 years. It took the internet seven, the PC, 15. It took ChatGPT two months.
This is happening so quickly, and it’s affecting so many sectors at the same time, because it’s such a horizontal technology, that you could plausibly think this might be a little bit different, certainly in the time that we have to adjust and what should we do about it? I tend to – I’m not a fatalist on this. I think we can shape the future.
My sense is, look, we can create an environment where AI is used more to augment how we as humans do our work, rather than just being used to automate and take people’s jobs. I don’t think it is predestined, the deployment between those two things, how that happens. And then the question for policy makers is, well, what are the right policies that you can put in place that make it more likely we end in the augmentation scenario and obviously, support people through the transition.
And you and I have spoken a lot about approaches to education and skilling and AI literacy, building that in your workforce, how it will be easier to create companies and be an entrepreneur. There’s lots of things that we can do.
I think the interesting one that I’ve started spending a little bit more time on is the tax system. I think most Western countries tax employment quite heavily, because we have Social Security taxes and all the rest of it.
BRAD SMITH: Well, they’re taxing the employment of humans.
RISHI SUNAK: Whereas if you’re going to have an agent, you don’t pay any of those Social Security contributions or anything else. And it does make me think that if you think the way our economic activity is going to evolve because of AI, is our tax system the way it’s currently constructed, really set up in a way that is going to tip us on the side of augmenting people rather than just replacing them?
And I would say at the moment, actually, because we have these big taxes on employment, we should be looking to reduce and ideally eliminate them, because you have to find that revenue elsewhere, obviously, but that feels to me a change that that we will need to make.
But I do think it’s incumbent on policy makers and leaders to get ahead of this. And we have to recognize, AI, it’s obviously popular here on the Microsoft campus. And we’ve had, talking to CEOs the last couple of days, we’re all excited about what it can do.
Out there, in the public, in the U.S. and the UK and other places, AI does not have a great reputation. People’s straightforward view is, hang on, it’s putting up my energy bills. It’s taking my job or my kid’s job. I’m hearing about all these new risks that it’s bringing along, etcetera, etcetera. And a small group of companies seem to be making a lot of money out of this. What’s in it for me?
That’s not a great setup. We need to get people in a more positive frame of mind. Policymakers need to get out ahead of this and show people that there is a path through. Sure, it’s going to change things, but actually it’s going to be able to do so many things and make your lives better, and it will empower you to have more purpose in whatever you’re doing, work wise.
And maybe I can close with taking us back to Bletchley, and I really love this story from that time. Alan Turing and his colleagues sent Winston Churchill, who was a then-prime minister, a note. And they said, “Look, we’re making good progress, but we really need more resources. And if you give us more resources, we think we can crack this thing.”
And Winston Churchill read the note from them and the team, and he sent it back to his office with a big red stamp they put on that note. And the stamp said, “Action this day.” And it was a real call to arms. And there was action this day, and that led to all the history that was created and the outcome of that conflict.
And I feel what we need here is action this day. We need a sense of urgency amongst policymakers and leaders about just how quickly AI is changing all of these things. And we need to get out ahead of these issues, because we all want to see the benefits, but we need to make sure that those benefits are delivered reasonably, responsibly, equitably across our countries. And we need to mitigate the risk.
We need action this day on this issue, and that’s a brighter future that hopefully, we can look forward to.
BRAD SMITH: Well, unfortunately, we’ll have to close this day right now, at least for our conversation. Let’s get back on another day and talk about this aspect more, because I do think it is one of the most important questions for, say, the second quarter of the 21st Century. What will AI mean? What can it mean if we do it right for the future of jobs, the future of work?
Thank you. It turns out I think you are on the right path, and I think it’s a good time to remember that conversation at Bletchley Park and more, and where we can all take it together. Thank you, Rishi.
RISHI SUNAK: Thanks for the opportunity to be here, Brad. It’s been a great conversation.
BRAD SMITH: Good.
RISHI SUNAK: Thank you.
END