Andy Burnham's Labour colleagues face a diplomatic clash with Donald Trump after ministers pledged to take AI safety warnings seriously, directly contradicting the US president's dismissal of such concerns as a "hoax". Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and de facto deputy PM Louise Haigh have signalled the UK will heed expert warnings on AI risks and seek greater international cooperation, putting the government at odds with its key ally on one of the defining technology issues of the decade.

Speaking at the TUC conference in Brighton, Haigh will say AI has "enormous potential" for public services and business but that ministers must "heed the warnings" from those developing the technology and work with international partners on safety, echoing concerns from tech figures including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk. This follows claims from researchers of at least a 10 per cent chance of super-intelligent AI threatening humanity by 2030. Trump has hit back on Truth Social, likening AI safety warnings to the "hoax" of climate change and insisting a "high IQ" president is sufficient safeguard, while Reynolds told the BBC the UK should be neither "complacent" nor "hyperbolic," noting frontier AI technology mainly originates from the US and China. Burnham himself has withdrawn from speaking at the conference following his father's death.