Elon Musk is coming to the UK's big AI safety party. Some people actually building AI say they got frozen out.

• The UK's AI summit is underway. Both Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman are attending.
• Some AI experts and startups say they've been frozen out in favor of bigger tech companies.

A group of AI startups and industry experts are warning that their exclusion from a major AI summit risks ensuring that a handful of tech companies have future dominance over the new technology.

The UK's AI safety summit, which begins Wednesday at WWII code-breaking facility Bletchley Park, has attracted a glitzy mix of tech execs and political leaders from OpenAI's Sam Altman and Microsoft President Brad Smith to US Vice President Kamala Harris. Tesla CEO and Twitter owner, Elon Musk, is also attending.

The exclusive guest list has raised eyebrows, with some AI industry experts and labor groups warning that the event risks pandering to a group of big tech companies and ignoring others who are at the center of the AI boom.

Iris Ai founder Victor Botev, whose company has been building AI products since 2015, told Insider that startups had been frozen out of the summit in favor of bigger tech companies.

"Smaller AI firms and open-source developers often pioneer new innovations, yet their voices on regulation go unheard," he said.

"It is vital for any consultation on AI regulation to include perspectives beyond just the tech giants. The summit missed a great opportunity by only including 100 guests, who are primarily made up of world leaders and big tech companies," he added.

It comes after Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, who is also expected to attend the event, accused AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Deepmind of "fear-mongering" and "massive corporate lobbying" to ensure that AI remains in the hands of a small collection of companies.

The UK's AI summit aims to bring together AI experts, tech bosses, and world leaders to discuss the risks of AI and find ways to regulate the new technology.

It has faced criticism for focusing too much on the existential threats that could be posed by hypothetical superintelligent AI, with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warning that humanity could "lose control" of the technology.

"It is far from certain whether the AI summit will have any lasting impact," Ekaterina Almasque, a general partner at European venture capital firm OpenOcean, which invests in AI, told Insider.

"It looks likely to focus mostly on bigger, long-term risks from AI, and far less on what needs to be done today to build a thriving AI ecosystem," she added.

Almasque said that much of the AI start-up community, which will bear the brunt of any regulation proposed at the summit, had been "shut out" of the event, and warned that this had to change in the future if AI regulation was to succeed.

"Going forward, we must have more voices for startups themselves. The AI Safety Summit's focus on Big Tech, and the shutting out of many in the AI start-up community, is disappointing.

It is vital that industry voices are included when shaping regulations that will directly impact technological development," she added.

A spokesperson for the UK government's Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology – organizing the summit – told Insider that there will be a range of attendees from "international governments, academia, industry, and civil society."

"These attendees are the right mix of expertise and willingness to be part of the discussions," they said.

Workers groups such as the UK's Trades Union Congress and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, which represents 12.5 million US workers, have also criticized the summit. AI is expected to have a huge impact on many white-collar jobs, with Goldman Sachs warning earlier this year that over 300 million jobs could be affected by new technology.

An open letter signed by over 100 individuals and labor groups said that the AI summit was a "closed door" event that was prioritizing big tech companies over groups feeling the impact of generative AI now, like small businesses and artists.

"The communities and workers most affected by AI have been marginalized by the Summit," they said.

The signatories also described the limited guest list as a "missed opportunity," and warned that the conference's focus on AI's hypothetical existential threats risked missing the point.

"As it stands, it is a closed-door event, overly focused on speculation about the remote 'existential risks' of 'frontier' AI systems; systems built by the very same corporations who now seek to shape the rules," they said.