King Charles hosted the AI labs in Scotland and asked for control before it's too late
The head of state who stays out of politics put the AI labs in one Scottish room and asked them for a means of control.
On September 17, 2026, King Charles III got the people who build and regulate AI into one room at Dumfries House in East Ayrshire, and opened the day with a speech. Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic each sent someone (royal.uk names the firms, not the executives). So did the UK government: Kanishka Narayan, its Minister for Artificial Intelligence, was there.
The speech is up on the Royal Family's own site, and it's short. The King reads the industry's warnings back to the industry, then asks whether anybody has worked out how to keep control. That surprised me more than the guest list did, and I think the asking is the news.
- Convened by
- His Majesty The King
- Where
- Dumfries House, East Ayrshire
- When
- 17 September 2026
- Tech firms represented
- Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic
- UK government
- Kanishka Narayan, Minister for Artificial Intelligence
- Facilitated by
- The Ditchley Foundation
What the King said to them
He started with the house. Dumfries House has become, in his words, "something of a living laboratory" for the philosophy of Harmony, which he co-wrote a book about some sixteen years ago (his own count, in the speech).
Then he got to AI, and he didn't soften it. AI is already saving lives in medicine, he said, but the people who created these technologies "are now increasingly warning that AI risks developing darker capacities". Five more words end that sentence: "perhaps even to take life".
Those in our world who value deeply our humanity and its vital moral component are anxiously seeking your reassurance that we will not lose control of our destiny, or our souls
Five days earlier Anthropic's chief executive had asked the labs to pace the frontier, and Anthropic was one of the four firms in the room. Granted, the King names no company and never uses the word pacing. The question lands on all four the same way.
Surely, we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?
The two questions
He said he was building on the message he sent to the United Kingdom AI Safety Summit in Bletchley in 2023. Then he put two questions to the room, and the second one is about everybody who wasn't in it.
First, how can we harness the benefits of AI, with safety at its heart? And, second, How can we build international cooperation and consensus to achieve this, so no Nation is left behind - but the human race is left in place?
He knew how that reads. "This may sound hyperbolic," he said, and answered himself: "I have long thought it is just enlightened realism".
What the room was there to decide
The Royal Family's account of the day says delegates "considered whether a shared set of principles could be established to guide the future application of AI", in discussions facilitated by The Ditchley Foundation. The framework would treat AI as "a tool that upholds human dignity and supports the flourishing of both people and the planet". Narayan is the only government figure on the page (the other non-industry seats went to The King's Trust and the Sustainable Markets Initiative).
Neither royal.uk page gives the text of those principles, names anyone who signed up to them, or sets a date for what comes next. Pretty much everything else I've read about that room came from the press. The King ended by saying he'd be back later the same day to hear the conclusions.