Hunting down money launderers and other fraudsters in London is to be ramped up using artificial intelligence, a minister said on Wednesday as Britain was hosting a landmark AI summit.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, as well as chief executives from the best-known AI companies in the world including Google Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman, of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, were taking part in the world’s first global artificial intelligence safety summit.
The two-day gathering at Bletchley Park, once the top-secret home of the World War Two Codebreakers, will focus on “frontier” AI which is the most revolutionary, offering the prospects of the most benefits to mankind, but potentially also risks that could be misused to create existential threats.
Other AI is already being rolled out across Government - including the Single Network Analytics Platform (Snap) to target criminals and which is being extended to cover Companies House, this month, in the new year to the insolvency area and also the Financial Conduct Authority.
The Snap analyses millions of data points, which often were previously siloed, across the public sector to identify possible suspicious activity and crime.
Cabinet Office minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe told The Standard: “The combination of this new act (Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act) and these better techniques will make it much more difficult for the fraudsters and make it less likely for the frausters to choose London, and encourage honest trade and investment which obviously is the history of this country.”
“It’s very innovative. It puts us on the front foot and it’s bringing in...high risk entity targeting, looking at risky relationships, multiple networks...you sort of have almost families of criminals, they can often be involved in white collar crime, but also in in trafficking, IP (intellectual property) fraud.
“We’re looking at shell companies. We’re looking at the databases that we’ve got in government and asking ourselves, can we look at these more intelligently?”
AI has already been used to identify companies which obtained Covid loans in the UK as associated with a terrorist sanctioned in the US, by making links, such as through an email or IP address, to reveal second and third order risks of fraud or other crimes.
The peer was given a briefing by British unicorn Quantexa, based near Waterloo and worth more than £1 billion, on how AI is helping to catch and deter fraudsters, including through the use of SNAP, an artificial intelligence tool that the company developed with the Public Sector Fraud Authority.
Quantexa founder and chief executive Vishal Marria said: “We are taking the fight to them.
“We are putting deep foundational technology in the arms of the UK Government so we can take this fight forward.”
He added: “It is a cat and mouse game...and we want to have the highest defences when it comes down to tackling economic crime and fraud across the UK.”
As tech giant chiefs and foreign dignitaries were heading to Bletchley Park, Baroness Neville-Rolfe said she believes Musk’s involvement will give the summit a “wider reach”.
She added: “It’s important. It’s very good that the Prime Minister is going to be talking to him because he is extremely well understood as knowing a great deal about this.”
She expects the summit’s focus on “frontier” futuristic AI will cover a “mixture of both” known unknowns, and unknowns unknowns, stressing: “It’s our job to try and find out what is coming down the path.”
Rishi Sunak has stressed that AI safety should be a global priority, emphasising the need to be “honest” with people about the potential dangers if artificial intelligence is misused but also warned against being “alarmist” or overly worry people right now.
Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, has warned of a potential “civilisational risk,” adding: “The consequences of AI going wrong are severe so we have to be proactive rather than reactive.”
Among the summit’s attendees are US Vice President Kamala Harris, who was pictured jetting into London on Monday night, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, United Nations’ Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, with China’s tech vice minister Wu Zhaohui also expected to be there.
In a speech at the US Embassy in London, Ms Harris was expected to say: “As history has shown in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritise profit over the wellbeing of their customers; the security of our communities; and the stability of our democracies.”
The aim of the summit is to start a global conversation on the future regulation of AI.
Currently there are no broad-based global regulations focusing on AI safety, although some governments and trading blocs have started drawing up their own rules.
Joe Biden has issued an executive order governing the use of AI across the US, the European Union has written the first set of legislation governing its use for its area and China’s Cyberspace Administration unveiled proposed rules in April that require AI platforms to adhere to the country’s stringent censorship laws.
Amid calls for a global treaty on AI, Canada’s minister of innovation, science and industry Francois-Philippe Champagne said artificial intelligence would not be constrained by national borders, and therefore interoperability between different regulations being put in place was important.
“The risk is that we do too little, rather than too much, given the evolution and speed with which things are going,” he said.
There will be a series of roundtable discussions at the summit on threats posed by future developments in the tech.
Topics include how AI systems might be weaponised by hackers, or used by terrorists to build bioweapons, as well as the technology’s potential to gain sentience and wreak havoc on the world.
Some 585 companies with ‘AI’ in their name have been registered in London since the start of 2023, data obtained via Companies House shows, nearly triple the number registered last year.
London saw a 41 per cent increase in new AI, software engineering, and data science roles in the year to September 2023, according to data from HR platform Deel.
Fifty-five per cent of the UK’s active AI companies are based in London, according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. London’s dedicated AI companies saw more than £1.7 billion of investment in 2022.
Google DeepMind research unit, based in Kings Cross, is set to be a major area of focus for the company as it seeks to gain an edge in the global AI race. In April the firm merged UK-based DeepMind with its Google Brain AI unit, leaving Hassabis, the British head of DeepMind, in charge of the combined group, cementing London’s status as a major global AI hub.
The United Nations has announced it had formed its own AI advisory board, including experts from industry, research, and different governments.
Britain is seeking to play an intermediary between the world’s three great power blocs, America, the EU and China, and hopes the summit will lay the groundwork for future international dialogue on artificial intelligence.
