Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy

Will Marshall is the founder of Planet, which uses satellites to plot the Earth's changing image and which has supplied data and imagery to support Ukraine's defence forces since Russia's full-scale invasion.

Appearing before MPs and peers on the National Security Strategy Committee, he wanted to make a wider point.

I think this body and this house should be spending far more time, it's priority number one, two and three, on regulating AI.

AI is at a point where it's runaway capabilities that we just don't know how to control.

He is on the Defense Select Committee.

He's on the Joint National Security Strategy Committee and is the co-host of the Chaos Theory podcast as well.

Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Hi.

And of course, uh, it was earlier this year, I think January, when the intelligence chiefs brought out their really very stark warning, their biodiversity, uh, threat assessment.

Uh, and as part of the conference, Emily Thornberry, who was there, uh, spoke alongside Richard Newgy, and she promised to ask the Joint Committee on National Security, the JCNS, to undertake a threat assessment which sets out how the UK food system could be attacked or undermined and used as a weapon of warfare.

And I wonder, again, if that's something that you could use and if that's something that you would, uh, support from the JCNS.

Most definitely.

This is just part of the housekeeping of any democracy.

A number of provisions went into that bill that were actually recommendations of a committee that I sit on called the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy.

We looked at a whole bunch of things around how tech and AI and foreign money is influencing our politics.

We made a number of recommendations, including a moratorium on crypto donations to political parties and a cap of 100,000 on donations from foreign sources.