Ed Davey will use his keynote at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton to call for a global non-proliferation treaty on super-intelligent AI, modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency. The proposal includes a new international AI safety agency headquartered in the UK, a global pause on superintelligent AI development, and a direct challenge to what Davey frames as unaccountable power concentrated among tech executives in California and Beijing. "We didn't leave the atom bomb to a few billionaires to police themselves," he will say. The nuclear analogy is politically effective but structurally weak. Nuclear weapons require rare fissile material, centrifuges, and industrial-scale facilities that are visible to satellites and supply-chain monitoring. AI capability runs on widely available GPUs, open-weight models, and talent that moves freely. The IAEA works because enrichment is physically hard to hide. There is no equivalent chokepoint for AI research. A non-proliferation framework that cannot define what it is preventing the proliferation of is a speech, not a policy. Davey's critique of the Burnham government's new AI partnership with the US is sharper than his solution. He argues the deal "doesn't come close to meeting the scale of this threat" and makes the UK "more dependent on a Trump administration in the pocket of the tech bros." This is a legitimate concern about sovereignty and leverage — but proposing a UK-headquartered global agency while simultaneously warning about US and Chinese dominance requires explaining why either power would submit to it. The conference also saw the party's home affairs spokesperson, Max Wilkinson, announce proposals for a big tech levy to fund a new online crime agency targeting child sexual abuse material, drug and weapons trafficking, and deepfake pornographic imagery. Wilkinson specifically called out Meta's smart glasses as "perv goggles," arguing people — especially women — were being recorded without consent. These are more tractable proposals with identifiable enforcement mechanisms, though funding details remain thin. Davey's broader conference pitch included a 10p per litre cut to fuel duty for three months, reducing the bus fare cap from £3 to £1, and a promise of further tax cuts financed by growth from seeking entry to the EU's single market. He praised Burnham for engaging on adult social care reform but said the "jury is out" on whether the prime minister will deliver. The AI proposal sits in an awkward space familiar to opposition parties: it identifies a real problem (concentrated, unaccountable power over transformative technology) but offers a solution whose enforcement mechanism is absent. The IAEA analogy implicitly promises inspection and verification regimes that do not yet exist for software. Without explaining what "pause" means technically, who verifies compliance, and what happens to violators, the proposal functions as rhetorical positioning rather than implementable governance. What Davey gets right is the democratic legitimacy question: decisions about AI development are currently being made by a handful of private actors with no public mandate. What he hasn't solved — and what no one has — is how to build inspection and enforcement infrastructure for a technology that, unlike nuclear weapons, can be developed in a basement with rented cloud compute.
