Global Consensus on AI Safety: Singapore Bridges US-China Divide

Singapore's Vision for AI Safety Bridges the US-China Divide

In a rare moment of global consensus, AI researchers from the US, Europe, and Asia came together in Singapore to form a plan for researching AI risks. The government of Singapore released a blueprint today for global collaboration on artificial intelligence safety following a meeting of AI researchers from the US, China, and Europe. The document lays out a shared vision for working on AI safety through international cooperation rather than competition. "Singapore is one of the few countries on the planet that gets along well with both East and West," says Max Tegmark, a scientist at MIT who helped convene the meeting of AI luminaries last month. "They know that they're not going to build [artificial general intelligence] themselves -- they will have it done to them -- so it is very much in their interests to have the countries that are going to build it talk to each other." The countries thought most likely to build AGI are, of course, the US and China -- and yet those nations seem more intent on outmaneuvering each other than working together. In January, after Chinese startup DeepSeek released a cutting-edge model, President Trump called it "a wakeup call for our industries" and said the US needed to be "laser-focused on competing to win." The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities calls for researchers to collaborate in three key areas: studying the risks posed by frontier AI models, exploring safer ways to build those models, and developing methods for controlling the behavior of the most advanced AI systems. The consensus was developed at a meeting held on April 26 alongside the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a premier AI event held in Singapore this year. Researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta all attended the AI safety event, as did academics from institutions including MIT, Stanford, Tsinghua, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Experts from AI safety institutes in the US, UK, France, Canada, China, Japan and Korea also participated. "In an era of geopolitical fragmentation, this comprehensive synthesis of cutting-edge research on AI safety is a promising sign that the global community is coming together with a shared commitment to shaping a safer AI future," Xue Lan, dean of Tsinghua University, said in a statement. The development of increasingly capable AI models, some of which have surprising abilities, has caused researchers to worry about a range of risks. While some focus on near-term harms including problems caused by biased AI systems or the potential for criminals to harness the technology, a significant number believe that AI may pose an existential threat to humanity as it begins to outsmart humans across more domains. These researchers, sometimes referred to as "AI doomers," worry that models may deceive and manipulate humans in order to pursue their own goals. The potential of AI has also stoked talk of an arms race between the US, China, and other powerful nations. The technology is viewed in policy circles as critical to economic prosperity and military dominance, and many governments have sought to stake out their own visions and regulations governing how it should be developed.

Researchers reboot push for AI safety after Paris summit bust

Experts researching threats stemming from artificial intelligence agreed on key work areas needed to contain dangers like loss of human control or easily accessible bioweapons in a report published Thursday. In "AI 2027", a widely-read scenario recently published online by a small group of researchers, competition between the United States and China drives Washington to cede control over its economy and military to a rogue AI, ultimately resulting in human extinction.Experts researching threats stemming from artificial intelligence agreed on key work areas needed to contain dangers like loss of human control or easily accessible bioweapons in a report published Thursday. Many safety-focused scientists were disappointed by February's Paris AI summit, where the French hosts largely left aside threats to home in on hoped-for economic boons. But "the mood was exactly the opposite of Paris" at a gathering of experts in Singapore in late April, said MIT researcher and conference organiser Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute that charts existential risks. "A lot of people came up to me and said that they had gotten their mojo back now... there's hope again," he told AFP. In a report put together at the conference, the experts name three overlapping work areas to focus on faced with ever-more-capable AIs: assessing risk from AI and its applications; developing AI that is safe and trustworthy by design; and monitoring deployed AI -- ready to intervene if alert signals flash. There is "global convergence around the technical challenges in AI safety", said leading researcher Yoshua Bengio, who helped compile the "Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities" report. "We have work to do that everybody agrees should be done. The Americans and the Chinese agree," Tegmark added. The AI safety community can be a gloomy place, with dire predictions of AI escaping human control altogether or proferring step-by-step instructions to build biological weapons -- even as tech giants plough hundreds of billions into building more powerful intelligences. In "AI 2027", a widely-read scenario recently published online by a small group of researchers, competition between the United States and China drives Washington to cede control over its economy and military to a rogue AI, ultimately resulting in human extinction. Online discussions pore over almost weekly hints that the latest AI models from major companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic could be trying to outwit researchers probing their capabilities and inner workings, which remain largely impenetrable even to their creators. Next year's governmental AI summit in India is widely expected to echo the optimistic tone of Paris. But Tegmark said that even running in parallel to politicians' quest for economic payoffs, experts' research can influence policy towards enforcing safety on those building and deploying AI. "The easiest way to get the political will is to do the nerd research. We've never had a nuclear winter. We didn't need to have one in order for (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev and (US President Ronald) Reagan to take it seriously" -- and agree on nuclear arms restraint, he said. Researchers' conversations in Singapore were just as impactful as the Paris summit was, "but with the impact going in a very, very different direction," Tegmark said.