US, UK strike new economic pact, but fall short of free trade deal

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - The US and UK inked Thursday a new economic partnership that seeks to bolster cooperation between the nations' economies, but fell short of striking a long-elusive free trade deal.

The Atlantic Declaration for a Twenty-First Century US-UK Economic Partnership, rolled out as UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met at the White House with President Joe Biden, seeks to modernize the bilateral economic relationship between the NATO allies.

Both leaders hailed the pact with Biden stressing it expands "our cooperation to shape the challenges and future for the remainder of this century."

"It's a testament to the depth, breadth and I would argue, the intensity of our cooperation and coordination, which has existed continuously between the United Kingdom and the United States," he told reporters.

"There's no issue of global point of importance, none, where our nations are not leading together, and where we're not sharing our common values to make things better," he added.

Sunak too hailed the agreement, calling it "a new economic partnership for a new age, of a kind that has never been agreed before."

"Yes, a partnership that protects our citizens. But more than that, a test case for the kind of reimagined alliances President Biden has spoken so eloquently about," he said.

Still many of those who were fierce proponents of the UK's exit from the EU, including Sunak's Conservative Party, said doing so would allow the UK to strike a free trade pact post-Brexit. Seven years have since passed without a deal.

Asked if the agreement is an acknowledgment that a free trade deal will not be brokered with Washington, Sunak said the pact responds "to the particular opportunities and challenges that we face right now and into the future."

"We've announced billions of pounds of investment into the UK, which is going to support thousands of jobs. And the agreement that we struck today will continue to do that. It will support tens of thousands of small businesses in the UK, removing unnecessary red tape so that they can trade and do business in the US far easier," he said.

"And I think those types of specific targeted measures that will deliver real benefits to people as quickly as possible are the right things for us to be focused on," he added.

The Atlantic Declaration seeks to enhance economic cooperation between Washington and London on a broad range of sectors, including critical and emerging technologies such as quantum computing, AI, synthetic biology and semiconductors.

It also seeks to mobilize private capital in both countries towards funding existing gaps in strategic technologies, and will seek to bolster reciprocal talent flows on both sides of the Atlantic. Supply chains are also being examined with the aim of ensuring critical technologies are more resilient in the future.

Sunak said he and Biden agreed to work together going forward on AI safety, saying "our job as leaders is to ensure that this technological revolution makes us more secure and not less." He pointed to a warning from AI leaders last week appealing for greater regulation in the AI sector.

Nonprofit group the Center for AI Safety issued a 22-word open letter co-signed by hundreds of experts, including the CEOs of three AI industry leaders -- Google DeepMind, Open AI and Anthropic -- two of three Turing Award winners considered the "godfathers" of AI, and the authors of the standard textbooks on AI, Deep Learning and Reinforced Learning.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," they warned.

The urgent appeal comes amid rapid advances in AI that have further increased fears of the technology's potential risks.