Clegg rejects kill switch and closed models, calls for transparency
Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could develop a “godlike power to exterminate humanity,” arguing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that apocalyptic warnings are “accidentally self-serving.”
Clegg, who stepped down as Meta’s president of global affairs in 2025 and co-founded AI startup AMI Labs, said focus should remain on known specific threats such as cybersecurity and bioweapons rather than the “slightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity.”
“I think it is perhaps accidentally self-serving, because it sort of implies that we can only be made safe by having everything controlled, in effect, by an oligopoly of a small number of companies, and I think it slightly paralyses the political debate,” Clegg said.
Clegg said he spends “a huge amount of time” with people in the technology industry and that “they don’t agree amongst themselves at all. Of course, we hear the most apocalyptic voices.” He said one person who runs an AI lab had told him the current discourse was “totally silly.”
“There is a culture in Silicon Valley — it’s an odd place for those who haven’t been there. It is in many ways the centre of the universe, or at least claiming to shape it. It’s also an oddly parochial place. It’s a strange sort of culture where the engineers can get quite close to the technology and start slightly breathing their own fumes as they wind themselves up into a lather about these things,” Clegg said.
Asked about the autonomous hack conducted by a group of OpenAI agents on Hugging Face, a major real-world company, Clegg said there was a case for “tramlines and greater transparency.” He said such measures would be unlikely under the Trump administration, given its focus on AI competitiveness.
On international cooperation, Clegg said China’s participation would be limited because AI development is viewed there as a “national mission” after the country was “cheated out of the Industrial Revolution.” He pointed instead to “the big three techno democracies in the world — India, Europe and the US” as potential collaborators.
Asked whether British Prime Minister Andy Burnham could take a lead on such efforts, Clegg said the UK was not a world leader on AI. “We need to be realistic about what influence we can and cannot exert,” he said.
Clegg also rejected two other proposed remedies. He said a “kill switch” would be unworkable, and that closed models — where source code is not made public — were no safer than open-source models according to the evidence. He instead proposed: “There is a lot that can be done both voluntarily and through regulation, to enforce far greater transparency on the way in which these models are concocted and how they operate.”
According to the Guardian, Clegg owns more than 917,000 shares in Nscale, a UK-based datacentre.