The Group Chat Where World Leaders Are Racing to Create AI Controls

An island meeting, texts between the leaders of Canada, France and Norway reveal an emerging alliance: ‘We’re in’

Norway’s prime minister thumbed out a text message to an increasingly familiar contact on his phone—a fellow head of government he hoped would join a nascent plan of Western leaders to design a new framework to regulate artificial intelligence.

Jonas Gahr Støre said that within 10 minutes, Canada’s Mark Carney had texted back: “Of course. We’re in.”

Around the same time, Carney was discussing AI regulation with French President Emmanuel Macron on the French Atlantic archipelago of St. Pierre and Miquelon just off Newfoundland, as Macron’s government called on the United Nations Security Council to focus on AI and security ahead of Wednesday’s General Assembly. By Monday, Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb had published a two-page paper arguing that AI “must remain under human direction, oversight and control” and suggested creating a global supervisory regime.

A club of Western presidents and prime ministers is leading a new push for global controls on AI, echoing the nuclear arms treaties that took root during the first decades of the Atomic Era.

In conversations with The Wall Street Journal, leaders and their aides described a global system in which the world’s top AI innovator—the U.S.—is, in their view, reluctant to address the potential risks of a technology powering America’s stock gains and economic growth.

Carney has proposed a global “technology stability” body that would help set norms and constraints.

“There are leaders that step forward and say, ‘OK, where can we take responsibility, come together?’” said Støre, speaking from Ottawa, where he had spent the day in meetings with Carney. “I hear the American president saying, you know, ‘The only thing that matters is beating China in the competition.’”

Whether or not AI is an eminent treat, you can be confident any politically derived response will be ineffective, “half-baked” bureaucratic bluster.

Or as likely, designed to benefit a specific politically connected group or organization against competition.

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