In November 2023, world leaders and technologists specializing in artificial intelligence gathered at Bletchley Park, the British estate that housed Alan Turing’s team of codebreakers during World War II, for the world’s first AI Safety Summit. Convened just 11 months after OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT thrust AI into the cultural and political spotlight, the meeting was framed as a necessary attempt to confront the catastrophic and even existential risks that increasingly powerful AI systems could potentially pose to society.
What emerged from Bletchley, however, was not an international governance framework but a diplomatic declaration. The summit did produce…