15 September 2026
AI company CEOs have called for
international cooperation to slow AI development, set safety
standards, and manage risks.
This comes in the wake
of recent AI hacking
incidents, and alarm raised by a resigning
employee of AI company Anthropic.
The
SMC asked experts to comment.
Dr Andrew Lensen,
Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence, School of
Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of
Wellington, comments:
Is a global agreement to slow
AI development achievable and how would this work? What
kinds of precedents can we draw from?
“I would love
to see a global agreement to slow AI development happen, but
it’s really hard to see in the current geopolitical
environment. Climate change is an existential risk, but the
Paris Agreement’s aim to not see temperatures rise beyond
1.5c wasn’t met. We have seen success on issues like the
ozone layer (the Montreal Protocol), but that was where
there was a clear alternative and the economic cost of
taking action was much less significant.
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“The
closest analogue we have in AI is probably the Bletchley
Declaration and the 2024 Seoul and 2025 Paris AI Summits,
but, a bit like the COP climate change conferences, they
don’t seem to have given the systemic change that we
deserve.
“I’m not advocating giving up, of course
— the best way for New Zealand to try and push for change
would be to re-establish our moral and ethical leadership in
this space, and band together with other middle powers, as
suggested by Canadian PM Mark Carney in Davos this
year.”
How does NZ compare to the rest of the world
in terms of AI adoption and concerns around
harm?
“We are a real mixed bag! Some numbers coming
out of AI providers like Anthropic suggest that we are among
the highest-uses of AI like Claude in the world, but survey
after survey has shown that we are also the most distrusting
and worried about AI globally.
“I see our
distrust/worry as a good thing, not a bad one; there are
many good uses of AI technology, but if used naively (AI for
AI’s sake), there is a real risk of unintended
consequences and unnecessary costs and resource usages. We
can’t compete to build these huge models, so positioning
ourselves as critical and responsible adopters would be a
much better plan.”
Amidst all of the noise, what
should we be focusing on?
“We see two polarised
views: either AI is going to make us extinct, or it’s all
hype and we should just ignore the fear-mongering. It’s
important to be a bit sceptical that the tech oligarchs may
be pushing this narrative for their own marketing, economic
gain, and to try and prevent new competitors, but we should
also use this opportunity to take more ownership over our
future.
“Setting up an AI institute, like we see in
Australia and elsewhere, would make us much more prepared to
tackle AI harms — both existing and emerging or
existential ones. Such an institute would have a mandate to
oversee and govern the use of AI in New Zealand to
prioritise the benefits to us rather than to Big Tech. We
can’t directly control what happens overseas, but we can
show much stronger leadership and governance at home, which
will also get us involved in conversations on the global
stage. At the moment, we’re looking like the odd duck
out!”
Conflict of interest statement:
“Co-director of LensenMcGavin AI (AI
consultancy).”
Dr Kevin Shedlock (Ngapuhi,
Ngati Porou, Whakatohea), Lecturer, School of Engineering
and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington,
comments:
Is a global agreement to slow AI
development achievable and how would this work? What kinds
of precedents can we draw from?
“International
communities are mobilizing their efforts to push back on
artificial intelligence however, I think the ‘cat is out
of the bag’ and turning back the clock is unachievable. As
a society we must be pro-active in confronting this
technology in a way that aids our community in positive ways
as opposed to mining community or national knowledge-based
systems.
“This will require becoming proactive,
paying attention during the development of any legislation,
new standards, new technologies moving forward – as
trusted experts, our nation’s academics will provide
important directions for this to occur.”
How does
NZ compare to the rest of the world in terms of AI adoption
and concerns around harm?
“New Zealand continues to
be lagging during the adoption of AI infrastructure which
will create further environmental challenges for Aotearoa as
a country.
“The idea that explainable AI systems
will continue to be highly debated given the level of impact
this technology will have upon our nation is an area of
expertise where New Zealand can be future leaders. This
speaks directly to levels of trust within the AI eco-system
during the development of these technologies, opening
questions specific to New Zealand.
“For example,
what are our Tiriti o Waitangi commitments to our nation,
how will Māori become impacted or benefactors of this
technology given the current and past grievances (trust)
that exist between the settlement government and Māori
communities?”
Amidst all of the noise, what should
we be focusing on?
“As a nation, be diligent during
the ongoing growth of this technology. Artificial
Intelligence is now in our communities and in our homes…
we interact with this technology on a daily basis – we
can’t just turn the tap off and remove ourselves from our
responsibilities to our whanau or our community to be
proactively challenging new and arriving AI
technologies.
“AI will change the way we live and
interact, the question we should be asking ourselves is
‘what do our digital selves look like as a nation,
community and whanau’. If we fail to confront these types
of questions, we risk endangering our current way of life
and allowing a new form of colonization… one that
weaponizes the way we think and interact and take into our
community.”
Conflict of interest statement: “No
conflicts.”
Dr Cassandra Mudgway, Senior
Lecturer Above the Bar, Faculty of Law, University of
Canterbury, comments:
Is a global agreement to slow
AI development achievable and how would this work? What
kinds of precedents can we draw from?
“I think
there is a useful distinction between slowing the
development of AI models and regulating the harms that AI
systems are already enabling.
“A global agreement to
slow AI development would be difficult to achieve. There are
strong commercial and geopolitical incentives for companies
and states to keep developing more capable systems,
particularly where AI capability is being treated as a
strategic advantage. But we have managed to make agreements
within similarly charged climates before, including
international agreements to limit nuclear
technology.
“I would also be cautious about making
frontier model development the centre of the AI safety
conversation. People are already experiencing serious harms
from generative AI. Sexualised deepfakes are one example. We
are seeing technology being used to create sexualised
material depicting people without their consent, with women
and girls disproportionately targeted. Those harms do not
depend on AI reaching some future level of capability. There
are already here.”
How does NZ compare to the rest
of the world in terms of AI adoption and concerns around
harm?
“New Zealand is part of the same AI ecosystem
as the rest of the world. The products are available here,
people are using them here, and harms arising from those
systems can occur here regardless of where the company
behind the technology is based.
“From my
perspective, one of the concerns is that AI regulation can
still be discussed quite abstractly. We should be paying
much closer attention to what these systems are already
enabling.”
Amidst all of the noise, what should we
be focusing on?
“I think we need to pay more
attention to the harms people are experiencing from AI
now.
“A lot of the public discussion is being driven
by concerns about increasingly autonomous systems, very
advanced models and the possibility of much more serious
risks in the future. While those conversations have value,
but they can also pull attention away from problems that are
already here. Right now.
“Again, AI-enabled gendered
harm is one of those problems. We know that AI is being used
to produce sexualised images of people without their
consent. We know that these systems can reproduce existing
patterns of discrimination and abuse. We can therefore ask
quite practical questions about what developers and
deployers should be required to do, when platforms should
have to intervene, and what remedies should be available to
someone whose image has been used in this way.
“I
would like to see more attention paid to those questions.
Regulation should be concerned with the conditions that
allow harmful uses of AI to develop and spread, rather than
leaving the response until after someone has been
harmed.
“The question is ultimately about
responsibility. Who is making these systems? Who is
deploying them? What do they know about the ways their
products are being used? And what should the law require
them to do about foreseeable harms? Those are questions we
can answer now, without waiting to see what the next
generation of AI looks like.”
Conflict of
interest statement: “No conflicts.”
Professor
Alistair Knott, Centre for Data Science and AI, Victoria
University of Wellington, comments:
“To participate
properly in the global conversation about AI capability and
AI safety, the New Zealand government needs an Office for
AI.
“AI technologies are obviously advancing at a
rapid pace. As AI systems improve to human level and beyond,
it’s increasingly important that New Zealand participates
in the international conversation about how best to assess
and govern these technologies. This is certainly something
that NZ needs to do in discussions with other countries. The
tech companies pushing AI products are multinational; the
discussion about how to oversee their products must also be
multinational.
“The discussions which must take
place must be organised and resourced. Other
countries have created institutional support to help with
the required work, by establishing dedicated offices, that
can coordinate efforts from relevant groups around the
country. The UK has an AI
Security Institute, and the Alan
Turing Institute, which performs a similar role
outside government). Australia recently set up an Office
of AI. Canada has an AI
Safety Institute; Singapore has
one too; so does Japan.
New Zealand does not yet have one, despite increasingly
urgent
calls.
We should set up a government-led AI office as soon as
possible.
“A nationally resourced AI office in New
Zealand will achieve two related things. Firstly it will
coordinate work happening within the country, in
universities, industry, the public sector, and civil
society, so that relevant voices can be heard as the
situation moves forward. Secondly, it can serve as an
interface to international conversations, so that New
Zealand’s position can be heard internationally.
Increasingly, these conversations take place through the AI
institutes of different countries. Without a national
institute of our own, our voices won’t be
heard.
“To make the right choices as AI advances, we
need efficient conversations, both nationally in New
Zealand and internationally. Setting up a national AI office
in New Zealand will help create both kinds of
efficiency.”
Conflict of interest statement: Not
yet received. This will be updated on our
website.
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