Ian Hogarth

Ian Hogarth co-founded the concert-discovery startup Songkick, became one of Europe’s most prolific angel investors in machine-learning companies, co-authors the influential annual State of AI Report with Nathan Benaich, and co-founded the venture fund Plural. His warning about AI carries unusual weight precisely because he spent his career funding it.

The God-like AI essay

In April 2023, weeks after GPT-4’s release, Hogarth published “We must slow down the race to God-like AI” in the Financial Times — a first-person reckoning in which an investor in dozens of AI startups concluded the frontier labs were racing toward artificial general intelligence without understanding what lies on the other side. The essay described a private dinner at which a researcher told him AGI could arrive far sooner than the public grasped, and called for governments to contain the race through oversight of the handful of labs running it.

From critic to referee

Two months later, in June 2023, Rishi Sunak’s government appointed him chair of the UK Frontier AI Taskforce, which became the AI Safety Institute — the first state body dedicated to safety-testing frontier models — later renamed the AI Security Institute in 2025. Under his chairmanship the institute recruited senior researchers from the labs themselves and secured pre-deployment access to test frontier models. Hogarth remains an active AI investor, a duality critics occasionally note; he argues that being pro-technology and demanding containment of god-like systems are the same position.