The power of AI is worrying senior Labour figures

Westminster is "waking up" to AI safety, the Guardian reports, which is generous — Westminster has spent years hitting snooze on that particular alarm, and now senior Labour figures are "worried" about "the power of AI." Worried. Not legislating, not funding a regulator with teeth, not publishing a bill. Worried. It is the most British possible response to a general-purpose technology: a feeling, expressed privately, to a newspaper, on a Saturday, in the hope that the feeling might be mistaken for a strategy.

Then there is the threat category on offer — "extremist groups and bad actors" — a phrase doing so much heavy lifting it ought to be claiming overtime. No named groups. No incidents. No numbers. Just a menacing noun-phrase and the implication that somewhere, someone is doing something with a model we'd rather they weren't. Note also the noun they reached for: not the risks of AI, the *power* of it. Which is at least an admission that the thing in the room is heavy, even if nobody has yet proposed lifting it properly.

What's genuinely notable is the direction of travel. The worry is no longer about chatbots writing school essays; it's about capability in the hands of people who mean harm, and the machine being potent enough for that to matter. Another paper has just assured its readers that there is no reason to panic; now senior figures in a governing party are briefing the Guardian that they are worried. Both can be true, of course — that's how a gap works. Waking up is the easy part. The hard part is what you do before your first coffee, and on this evidence the answer is: tell a newspaper how you feel.