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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivers a speech on artificial intelligence at the Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, on Oct. 26, 2023, in London.

Peter Nicholls | Getty Images News | Getty Images

The U.K. is set to hold its landmark artificial intelligence summit this week, as political leaders and regulators grow more and more concerned by the rapid advancement of the technology.

The two-day summit, which takes place on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2, will host government officials and companies from around the world, including the U.S. and China, two superpowers in the race to develop cutting-edge AI technologies.

It is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s chance to make a statement to the world on the U.K.’s role in the global conversation surrounding AI, and how the technology should be regulated.

Ever since the introduction of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the race toward the regulation of AI from global policymakers has intensified.

Of particular concern is the potential for the technology to replace — or undermine — human intelligence.

Where it’s being held

The AI summit will be held in Bletchley Park, the historic landmark around 55 miles north of London.

Bletchley Park was a codebreaking facility during World War II.

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It’s the location where, in 1941, a group of codebreakers led by British scientist and mathematician Alan Turing cracked Nazi Germany’s notorious Enigma machine.

It’s also no secret that the U.K. is holding the summit at Bletchley Park because of the site’s historical significance — it sends a clear message that the U.K. wants to reinforce its position as a global leader in innovation.

What it seeks to address

The main objective of the U.K. AI summit is to find some level of international coordination when it comes to agreeing some principles on the ethical and responsible development of AI models.

The summit is squarely focused on so-called “frontier AI” models — in other words, the advanced large language models, or LLMs, like those developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere.

It will look to address two key categories of risk when it comes to AI: misuse and loss of control.

Misuse risks involve a bad actor being aided by new AI capabilities. For example, a cybercriminal could use AI to develop a new type of malware that cannot be detected by security researchers, or be used to help state actors develop dangerous bioweapons.

Loss of control risks refer to a situation in which the AI that humans create could be turned against them. This could “emerge from advanced systems that we would seek to be aligned with our values and intentions,” the government said.

Who’s going?

Major names in the technology and political world will be there.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the conclusion of the Investing in America tour at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 14, 2023.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

They include:

Who won’t be there?

Several leaders have opted not to attend the summit.

French President Emmanuel Macron.

Chesnot | Getty Images News | Getty Images

They include:

  • U.S. President Joe Biden
  • Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
  • French President Emmanuel Macron
  • German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

When asked whether Sunak feels snubbed by his international counterparts, his spokesperson told reporters Monday, “No, not at all.”

“I think we remain confident that we have brought together the right group of world experts in the AI space, leading businesses and indeed world leaders and representatives who will be able to take on this vital issue,” the spokesperson said.

“This is the first AI safety summit of its kind and I think it is a significant achievement that for the first time people from across the world and indeed from across a range of world leaders and indeed AI experts are coming together to look at these frontier risks.” 

Will it succeed?

The British government wants the AI Summit to serve as a platform to shape the technology’s future. It will emphasize safety, ethics, and responsible development of AI, while also calling for collaboration at a global level.

Sunak is hoping that the summit will provide a chance for Britain and its global counterparts to find some agreement on how best to develop AI safely and responsibly, and apply safeguards to the technology.

In a speech last week, the prime minister warned that AI “will bring a transformation as far reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet” — while adding there are risks attached.

“In the most unlikely but extreme cases, there is even the risk that humanity could lose control of AI completely through the kind of AI sometimes referred to as super intelligence,” Sunak said.

Sunak announced the U.K. will set up the world’s first AI safety institute to evaluate and test new types of AI in order to understand the risks.

He also said he would seek to set up a global expert panel nominated by countries and organizations attending the AI summit this week, which would publish a state of AI science report.

A particular point of contention surrounding the summit is Sunak’s decision to invite China — which has been at the center of a geopolitical tussle over technology with the U.S. — to the summit. Sunak’s spokesperson has said it is important to invite China, as the country is a world leader in AI.

International coordination on a technology as complex and multifaceted as AI may prove difficult — and it is made all the more so when two of the big attendees, the U.S. and China, are engaged in a tense clash over technology and trade.

China’s President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden at the G20 Summit in Nusa Dua on the Indonesian island of Bali on Nov. 14, 2022.

Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images

Washington recently curbed sales of Nvidia’s advanced A800 and H800 artificial intelligence chips to China.

Different governments have come up with their own respective proposals for regulating the technology to combat the risks it poses in terms of misinformation, privacy and bias.

The EU is hoping to finalize its AI Act, which is set to be one of the world’s first pieces of legislation targeted specifically at AI, by the end of the year, and adopt the regulation by early 2024 before the June European Parliament elections.

Stateside, Biden on Monday issued an executive order on artificial intelligence, the first of its kind from the U.S. government, calling for safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research into AI’s impact on the labor market.

Shortcomings of the summit

Some tech industry officials think that the summit is too limited in its focus. They say that, by keeping the summit restricted to only frontier AI models, it is a missed opportunity to encourage contributions from members of the tech community beyond frontier AI.

“I do think that by focusing just on frontier models, we’re basically missing a large piece of the jigsaw,” Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of London-based AI startup Builder.ai, told CNBC in an interview last week.

“By focusing only on companies that are currently building frontier models and are leading that development right now, we’re also saying no one else can come and build the next generation of frontier models.”

Some are frustrated by the summit’s focus on “existential threats” surrounding artificial intelligence and think the government should address more pressing, immediate-term risks, such as the potential for deepfakes to manipulate 2024 elections.

Photo by Carl Court

“It’s like the fire brigade conference where they talk about dealing with a meteor strike that obliterates the country,” Stefan van Grieken, CEO of generative AI firm Cradle, told CNBC.

“We should be concentrating on the real fires that are literally present threats.”

However, Marc Warner, CEO of British AI startup Faculty.ai, said he believes that focusing on the long-term, potentially devastating risks of achieving artificial general intelligence to be “very reasonable.”

“I think that building artificial general intelligence will be possible, and I think if it is possible, there is no scientific reason that we know of right now to say that it’s guaranteed safe,” Warner told CNBC.

“In some ways, it’s sort of the dream scenario that governments tackle something before it’s a problem rather than waiting until stuff gets really bad.”

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Joby Aviation says it is doubling production at its air taxi manufacturing hub

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Joby Aviation says it is doubling production at its air taxi manufacturing hub

JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, stands near an electric air taxi by Joby Aviation at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.

Roselle Chen | Reuters

Joby Aviation is ramping up its manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. as it races to roll out air taxi service in 2026.

The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) maker said Tuesday that it’s launching production at its remodeled components facility in Dayton, Ohio, and plans to double capacity at its Marina, California, manufacturing hub.

“Reimagining urban mobility takes speed, scale, and precision manufacturing. Our expanded manufacturing footprint in both California and Ohio is preparing us to do just that,” said product chief Eric Allison in a release.

Shares jumped more than 7%, building on a 16% year-to-date gain.

Joby Aviation and competitors such as Archer Aviation and Eve Air Mobility are aiming to roll out eVTOLs worldwide that can ease traffic congestion in crowded city centers, but they are awaiting regulatory approval.

The company is currently in the process of gaining Federal Aviation Administration approval for its vehicles.

Read more CNBC tech news

Last month, Joby Aviation shares popped on news that it delivered its first eVTOL to the United Arab Emirates, with plans to launch service in the region next year. The company agreed to an exclusive six-year deal to roll out air taxi service in Dubai last February.

Joby said the new facilities will create hundreds of new full-time jobs and underscore its commitment to fostering American innovation. At full capacity, the 435,500-square-foot California factory will manufacture as many as 24 aircraft annually.

The electric air transport company also said the opening coincided with the flight of its sixth aircraft.

Engineers from Toyota will help ramp up aircraft production to 500 annually at the Ohio facility. The companies inked a $500 million deal last year.

Shares of Joby and its competitors have ballooned in value this year as interest in the technology gains steam.

In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included the creation of an air taxi testing program.

WATCH: Joby Aviation CEO on UAE delivery: This is a huge milestone for us

Joby Aviation CEO on UAE delivery: This is a huge milestone for us

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Commerce Secretary Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip

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Commerce Secretary Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip

Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy And Innovation Summit 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said the Trump administration reversed course on allowing Nvidia to sell its AI chips to China because the U.S. company will not be giving over its best technology.

Lutnick made the remark speaking with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, saying that Nvidia wants to sell China its “4th best” chip, which is slower than the fastest chips that U.S. companies use.

“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Lutnick said.

Nvidia said Monday night that it would soon resume sales of the H20 chip to China after the Trump administration signaled that it would grant the chipmaker necessary export licenses.

Lutnick said that the administration said that the renewed sale of H20 chips to China was linked to a rare-earths magnet deal. Lutnick said it was in U.S. interests to have Chinese companies using American technology so they continue to use an American “tech stack.”

“The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” Lutnick said. “We want to keep having the Chinese use the American technology stack, because they still rely upon it.”

Similarly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said in recent weeks that the U.S. should continue selling his chips to China so Chinese companies don’t invest in homegrown infrastructure. Huang on Sunday also said that the Chinese military wouldn’t use Nvidia chips anyway, and previously signaled that China’s Huawei is a legitimate competitor.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick said. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

The reversal is a major win for Nvidia. Huang had previously said that the Trump administration’s decision to require a license for the H20 chip in April “effectively closed” the China market. Nvidia said that it could have sold $8 billion in H20 chips in the current quarter before sales were stopped.

Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick on Indonesia trade deal: No tariffs there, they pay tariffs here

The administration reversed its decision after President Donald Trump met with Huang in Washington last week.

“You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” Lutnick said. “That’s the thinking.”

The H20 chip was introduced in 2022 in response to Biden administration export controls. It’s based on the same underlying technology as Nvidia’s Hopper-generation chips, which are sold in the U.S. as finished systems using H100 or H200 chips.

The U.S. chipmaker took some features out of the H20 in order to sell it to China, including fewer graphics processing unit cores and lower bandwidth connecting separate parts of the chip. But the success of the DeepSeek R1 model suggested that there were many Chinese companies that were just fine with the slowed-down chips. The China-specific H20 is behind Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the H100 and the H200, Lutnick said.

Nvidia says that it releases new artificial intelligence chips every year and that serious AI developers should always try to get the latest and greatest versions because the technology is improving so quickly.

The best AI chips broadly available from clouds and system makers today are called Blackwell, and come as a GB200 chip with a paired central processing unit as well as B100 and B200 versions. Nvidia also makes a range of Blackwell-based chips for gaming and graphics that can be used for AI, but they’re generally weaker than the biggest chips designed for data centers.

A successor, called Blackwell Ultra, is only now starting to be installed in data centers, and it’s expected to ramp in volume over the next year. In 2027, Nvidia will release “Vera Rubin” chips.

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It’s a huge week for crypto in D.C. But the industry may not get everything it wants

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It's a huge week for crypto in D.C. But the industry may not get everything it wants

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.

Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters

It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.

The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.

The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.

But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.

Seeking CLARITY

The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.

The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.

The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.

Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.

“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”

Pushing it to pass

Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.

The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.

Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.

“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”

Read more CNBC tech news

The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.

Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.

“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.

GENIUS and the Fed

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