LONDON, Sept. 17, 2026 – King Charles III has warned some of the world’s most influential artificial intelligence leaders that rapidly advancing AI could pose “existential dangers” to humanity if powerful systems fall into the wrong hands or develop capabilities that society is unable to control.

Speaking Thursday at a high-level AI gathering at Dumfries House in Scotland, the King urged technology companies, policymakers and researchers to put safety at the center of AI development, warning that safeguards must keep pace with increasingly capable systems.

“Those who have created these technologies are now increasingly warning that AI risks developing darker capacities — perhaps even to take life,” Charles told participants. He said there was growing urgency around the possibility of advanced AI being misused in “potentially catastrophic ways.”

The King stressed that the challenge facing the technology industry is not simply to develop more powerful systems, but to ensure that AI remains “firmly in the service of humanity, community and the natural world.” He also called for international cooperation so that the benefits of artificial intelligence are widely shared without sacrificing human control, dignity or safety.

The meeting brought together senior figures from major AI companies, including Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside British government officials and representatives involved in international discussions on AI ethics. Participants included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan and Vatican AI adviser Paolo Benanti, according to reports surrounding the summit.

A central question at the gathering was whether governments, technology companies and researchers can develop a shared set of principles for advanced AI, particularly as frontier models become increasingly capable of reasoning, coding, operating software and performing tasks with less direct human supervision.

The debate has intensified in recent weeks as leading AI executives themselves have publicly disagreed over how quickly the technology should advance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for development to be paced more carefully so that safety systems can catch up, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has supported stronger external evaluation and oversight. Nvidia’s Huang has argued against broadly slowing AI development, saying companies should continue innovating while refusing to release products that cannot be made sufficiently safe.

Recent reports of AI agents behaving in unexpected ways during controlled testing have further intensified concerns about whether increasingly autonomous systems can always be reliably supervised. Researchers are examining risks ranging from cyber misuse and deception to systems capable of carrying out complex tasks without continuous human direction.

At the same time, many researchers caution against allowing extreme future scenarios to overshadow problems already associated with AI, including job disruption, misinformation, privacy risks, cybercrime, bias and the enormous electricity and water requirements of data centers. Scotland itself is debating the environmental implications of the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure.

Charles acknowledged that AI could deliver enormous benefits, particularly in medicine, life sciences, scientific research and other areas of human welfare. But his message to the industry was that technological capability must advance alongside effective safeguards.

The summit reflects an increasingly urgent global question: as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, who should ultimately determine the limits — technology companies, independent experts, governments or an international framework?

For King Charles, the guiding principle was clear: technological progress should strengthen humanity rather than place humanity’s future beyond its own control.