Kamala Harris and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are reportedly to meet and discuss the wars in Ukraine and Israel during the vice president’s trip to London this week to attend an artificial intelligence summit.
Harris is expected to talk about the Israel-Hamas war and “consult on next steps in our support for Ukraine” with Sunak during a visit to London later this week, Reuters reported Monday, citing an unnamed White House official.
The meeting comes days after a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris aired, in which the vice president addressed whether American forces might get involved on the ground in the Gaza Strip, where American hostages were taken during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
“We have absolutely no intention, nor do we have any plans to send combat troops into Israel or Gaza, period,” Harris said.
The vice president is scheduled to depart for the United Kingdom Tuesday and return on Nov. 2, and she will be accompanied by her husband, Douglas Emhoff, according to her office.
Harris will deliver a speech outlining the Democratic administration’s approach to artificial intelligence on Nov. 1 before attending a summit on the topic the next day at Bletchley Park, a historic estate north of London that once served as a base for World War II codebreakers. Teams at what’s dubbed the spiritual home of modern computing were able to crack the Nazis’ Enigma cipher, helping to end the war.
President Biden on Monday signed what the White House dubbed a “landmark executive order to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence.”
Meanwhile, the European Union is putting the final touches on a comprehensive set of regulations that targets the riskiest applications for the technology.
Kirsten Allen, a spokeswoman for Harris, told The Associated Press the goal is a future “where every person is safe from the harms of AI and where every person can share equally in its benefits.”
Sunak hopes to carve out a prominent role for Britain on the issue.
The summit will focus on the risks from what’s known as frontier artificial intelligence, which is cutting edge systems that can carry out a wide range of tasks and pose unknown risks to public safety. These systems are underpinned by large language models, which are trained on vast pools of text and data.
U.S. and European officials have spoken of working with “like-minded countries” to draw up guardrails for artificial intelligence. China has also been invited to the summit.
In a speech on Thursday, Sunak defended the invitation against criticism that China should have been excluded, though he couldn’t say with “100% certainty” that Beijing will attend.
Some lawmakers in Sunak’s Conservative party had called for China’s invitation to be rescinded after the revelation that a parliamentary researcher was arrested on suspicion of spying for Beijing.
“There can be no serious strategy for AI without at least trying to engage all of the world’s leading AI powers,” Sunak said. “That might not have been the easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.”
