What was the point of Rishi Sunak’s landmark AI summit at Bletchley Park? The Prime Minister has just given a press conference at the end of it in which he tried to underline his achievements. These included bringing together more than 100 of the leading AI nations and leading companies handling the technology and reaching a commitment to state-backed testing and evaluation before any AI technology is released.

For Sunak, Britain being at the front of conversations about AI is also about the country’s identity post-Brexit

He did, though, have to acknowledge that the UK is not going to be leading the world on AI safety and regulation. He made reference to the institutes set up by both the UK and the US – rather than just one institute as he has previously proposed. The US has not responded in the way that Sunak had hoped on this, to the extent that Kamala Harris did her own speech in London about the Biden administration’s policies, showing that they are not being led by the UK.

But Sunak clearly wants to at least be in the group leading from the front, telling the press conference that this would be the first of a series of summits. For him, Britain being at the front of starting the conversations about AI and bringing countries together isn’t just about the technology but also about the country’s identity post-Brexit.

There are, of course, lots of questions about AI – which is partly why Sunak wants there to be regular summits. He was asked about whether AI will end up taking people’s jobs, and argued that it was best viewed as a ‘co-pilot’ to make jobs work more efficiently. Interestingly, Sunak used the benefits tribunals backlog as an example of that, saying AI could help the same person working through the backlog get through it quicker.

But the refusal to invite the TUC union to the summit has allowed unions to brand Sunak as not being interested in the real impact on jobs and workers’ rights. One of them is whether a voluntary agreement on pre-release AI evaluation is really realistic. The answer, of course, is that you can’t enforce it so you have to take the sector with you. But given the government’s relationship with non-rogue tech giants on other matters has been so poor over the past few years, there are going to need to be a lot more summits before it becomes clear whether that agreement is actually going to mean anything.