US AI firm Anthropic met the UK science, innovation and technology secretary every month in Q1 this year, where AI energy demands and the future of AI summits were discussed, new documents show.
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, the US AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, met with technology secretary Peter Kyle on February 10, while Jack Clark, Anthropic's policy chief, met Kyle on January 6 and March 21, documents obtained via Freedom of Information show.
The redacted documents show that OpenAI competitor Anthropic, valued at over $60bn and backed by Google and Amazon, requested a meeting with Kyle and UK prime minister Keir Starmer.
The documents also show that Amodei and Kyle discussed this year’s AI Action Summit in Paris and the direction of future summits. India is set to host the next AI summit.
Anthropic, founded in 2021, and Kyle also discussed the importance of energy demands in the AI sector, the UK’s AI Action plan, and the international AI landscape.
In one of the meetings, Kyle also explained the government's decision to rename the AI Safety Institute to the AI Security Institute.
Anthropic and the UK government are partners, having inked a deal earlier this year to explore how Claude can improve people’s interaction with public information and services.
The documents reveal how energy demands are a key issue as the UK government looks to become an AI “superpower”.
The UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan, announced in January this year, includes a focus on data centres and infrastructure to support AI development, with the hope of attracting data centre investment.
But building the infrastructure requires large-scale energy demands, in a country which has some of the highest energy prices in the world as well as net-zero commitments.
According to the Social Market Foundation, a public policy think-tank, powering a 100MW data centre in the UK costs four times as much as an equivalent project in the US.
Other documents obtained show that Kyle held a meeting on February 10 with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, OpenAI head of Europe & Middle East policy & partnerships, Sandro Gianella, and Matt Clifford, the UK government’s AI advisor.
In the meeting, Gianella and Kyle discussed the importance of a digital government, while the UK digital wallet and the Gov.UK app were discussed.
On the same day, Kyle met Rene Haas, CEO of UK chipmaker ARM and Clifford, where they discussed AI policy in the UK.
That day, Kyle also met Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Clifford, where the importance of digital inclusion was discussed and where Kyle requested a follow-up discussion on Artificial General Intelligence, defined as artificial intelligence that can match humans at any task.
On February 11, Kyle also met Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs and Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, also attended by Clifford, where the importance of deploying AI in the public sector was discussed.
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