International AI Safety Report
The International AI Safety Report is the first global, government-commissioned scientific review of risks from advanced AI. Its first full edition was published in January 2025, chaired by yoshua-bengio, with contributions from 96 experts representing 30 nations plus the United Nations.
Origins
Commissioned at the November 2023 UK AI Safety Summit under the working title International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI. An interim report was published in May 2024 ahead of the AI Seoul Summit. The full report followed in early 2025.
Structure
The report covers:
- Capabilities of frontier AI and trajectory of development
- Risks from misuse (e.g. cyber, bio, manipulation)
- Risks from malfunction (alignment failures, robustness, bias)
- Risks from societal disruption (labor, concentration, accountability)
- Cross-cutting risk factors (open weights, race dynamics, monitoring gaps)
- Technical risk-management methods
By design, the report does not make policy recommendations. Its mandate is evidence consolidation — informing policy through findings, not prescribing them. This was a deliberate choice to keep it scientifically credible across 30 governments with very different policy preferences.
Significance
The report is the closest analogue in AI safety to the IPCC reports for climate. It does several things no prior document did:
- Establishes a shared evidentiary baseline that governments, regulators, and civil society can reference.
- Bridges the research–policy gap by being authored by working researchers but commissioned by states.
- Treats existential and catastrophic risks alongside near-term harms in a single framework — implicitly resolving the near-term-harms-vs-x-risk tension at the level of policy discourse.
- Validates the Bengio/Hinton wing of the field at a level previously reserved for technical communities.
It is intended as a recurring publication, with future editions tracking how risks and the science of mitigating them evolve.
Connection to This Wiki
- Co-produced by yoshua-bengio, whose voice now sits alongside stuart-russell, nick-bostrom, and geoffrey-hinton in the article’s “AI godfathers” framing of x-risk concern.
- Co-commissioned by the AI Safety Institutes.
- Cited in ai-safety as the field’s first global scientific review.
Related Pages
- ai-safety
- ai-governance
- ai-safety-summit-2023
- ai-safety-institute
- yoshua-bengio
- existential-risk
- near-term-harms-vs-x-risk
- ai-safety
- geoffrey-hinton
- nick-bostrom
- stuart-russell
- summary-ai-xrisk-belgium-europe
- lawzero
- governance-architectures
- ai-governance
- ai-safety-institute
- ai-safety-atlas-textbook
- atlas-ch4-governance-04-governance-architectures