China said it attended a top-level ministerial meeting at the U.K. AI Safety Summit on Thursday, despite not being listed by Britain among the "like-minded" participants and not featuring in official handshakes or the family photograph. China's absence sparked questions because it participated in the first day of the two-day summit on the safety of "frontier" artificial intelligence, and Britain declined to say why Beijing was not among those joining the second day's senior meeting. China's delegate to the meeting, Vice Minister of Science and Technology Wu Zhaohui, was present on Thursday, his ministry said Friday. China's participation in the second-day ministerial meeting has not been previously reported.

Speaking after the first day of the ICT meeting, Takaichi said she introduced eight basic principles Tokyo believes important when developing computer science that gives machines human-like intelligence, and that she was generally supported in calling for further discussion. The eight principles include making AI networks controllable by human beings and respect for human dignity and privacy. "The development of AI is expected to progress at a tremendous pace of speed, and it should be amazing technology that does not give anxiety to people," the minister of internal affairs and communications told reporters, noting the need to deepen international discussion about establishing a basic set of rules. The first G-7 ICT ministerial meeting in nearly two decades comes at a time when cyberattacks have become a global reality and the development of such potentially revolutionary technologies as artificial intelligence and the "Internet of Things" (IoT) -- the concept of connecting various products to the Internet -- continues apace. With cyberattacks having become a global reality, participants from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States discussed at the G-7 meeting ways to utilize advances in the field to drive economic growth while ensuring data security.