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Can Elon the Elon Musk Star Power give Sunak what he couldn’t get from fellow world leaders not in attendance at todays AI Summit.

The event at Bletchley Park over the next two days is Sunak hope for Legacy like Johnson had both Brexit & his leadership in rallying the global leaders in support of Ukraine.

The US tech billionaire is probably the biggest name in attendance and Sunak is surely hoping the X social media platform owner will boost the UK as a world influencer in AI and reassert the UK’s influence post Brexit, giving the UK a potential early advantage in the growing future of AI.

Bletchley Park is famously known for being the home for the WW2 code breakers is the host venue for this summit, but the lack of attendance from G7 leaders and the current ongoing events in the Middle East since the major attack by Hamas on Israel is bound to be seen as a setback by the government and they will be hoping that the planned live-stream between Sunak and Musk on his X social media platform will turn things around positively.

Italian premier Giogia Meloni & US Vice President Kamala Harris are really the only to high profile world leaders in attendance, so maybe the rest of world leaders see other domestic and international issues more important to their countries. Last week, Sunak warned that AI would make it easier to build chemical and biological weapons, facilitate cyber-attacks, fraud and child sexual abuse, and even pose a risk to humanity itself. There are also benefits, he said, including making public services more cost efficient, but its the potential negative threats that AI could potentially facilitate that the Sunak team see as a political strength for someone who studied and worked in Silicon Valley, as they seek to present him as better equipped than Sir Keir Starmer — whose opposition Labour Party leads the Tories by about 20 points in national opinion polls — to address technological challenges ahead of an election expected in 2024.

The summit offers a “test case of the argument that having left the EU, we will have greater flexibility to set our own rules,” said Matthew Gill, program director at the Institute for Government think tank. “Musk attending clearly does raise the summit’s profile.”

The two-day summit was prompted by UK concerns about powerful AI models expected to be released next year, which will have capabilities the government fears not even developers understand. It’s effectively the first effort to convene global leaders and senior technology executives together to help shape an international approach to AI.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are expected to attend. France is sending Economy Minister Bruno le Maire while Germany will be represented by Digital Minister Volker Wissing.

Representatives of the Chinese government and tech giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd will also attend, according to an attendee list published on Tuesday.

Part of the problem for Sunak is that even as he highlighted the risks, he has made clear he doesn’t want to “rush to regulate” AI. That effectively turns the summit into a bid to establish a global consensus on what the draft communique from the summit calls the risk of “catastrophic harm” from the technology.

It’s a position that tries to strike a balance between not stifling innovation and business, which is part of Sunak’s political pitch, and the government’s promise to protect voters from potential threats.

This actually puts the UK behind the US and EU, who have begun to introduce legislation to regulate AI. Which only goes to hamper Sunak’s mission to put the UK at the forefront of AI.

Reed Recruitment data has shown the UK’s AI sector has actually half the jobs open that it did two years ago which again very much undermines Sunak’s pledge to build the industry.

Sunak can still emerge from the Bletchley Park Summit with a communique signed by 28 countries. The language has been re-drafted to give governments wiggle room for their domestic legislation, according to a person familiar with the process.

Business executives expected to attend include former UK deputy premier Nick Clegg, now president of global affairs at Meta Platforms Inc, as well as James Manyika and Demis Hassabis from Alphabet Inc’s Google and DeepMind Technologies Ltd.

The UK published a study on Friday which summarised — but didn’t mandate — ways companies could tackle risks. To help prevent scenarios where AI could be used to develop hacking tools or weapons, it said, firms could share information with governments and each other, introduce corporate governance, and be ready to delay releases or roll back to previous versions.

In response to a request from the UK, Amazon.com Inc, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft Corp published their own safety policies, including simulating attacks on or malicious use of their systems.

This summit is “absolutely vital” for the UK, said Maya Dillon, head of AI at Cambridge Consultants. “It’s our way of saying to the world, we still lead the way in the development of technology,” she said. Goals should be a time frame for regulation and legislation, and a mandate for transparency of AI usage in areas including medicine and financial services, she said.

Yet in a sign of the US’s centre of gravity in AI, all the companies cited commitments they made in July alongside US President Joe Biden. Companies and technology ministers are the main focus of the first day of the summit on Wednesday, led by UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan.