The Bletchley Park artificial intelligence summit in 2023 was a landmark event in AI regulation simply by virtue of its existence. Between the event's announcement and its first day, the mainstream conversation had changed from a tone of light bafflement to a general agreement that AI regulation may be worth discussing. However, the task for its follow-up, held at a research park on the outskirts of Seoul this week, is harder: can the UK and South Korea show that governments are moving from talking about AI regulation to actually delivering it? At the end of the Seoul summit, the big achievement the UK was touting was the creation of a global network of AI safety institutes, building on the British trailblazers founded after the last meeting. The technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, attributed the new institutes to the "Bletchley effect" in action, and announced plans to lead a system whereby regulators in the US, Canada, Britain, France, Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore and the EU share information about AI models, harms and safety incidents.

The UK is leading an international effort to test the most advanced AI models for safety risks before they hit the public, as regulators race to create a workable safety regime before the Paris summit in six months. Britain's AI Safety Institute, the first of its kind, is now matched by counterparts from around the world, including South Korea, the US, Singapore, Japan and France. Regulators at the Seoul AI Summit hope the bodies can collaborate to create the 21st-century version of the Montreal Protocol, the groundbreaking agreement to control CFCs and close the hole in the ozone layer. But before they do, the institutes need to agree on how they can work together to turn an international patchwork of approaches and regulations into a unified effort to corral AI research. "At Bletchley, we announced the UK's AI Safety Institute – the world's first government-backed organisation dedicated to advanced AI safety for the public good," said Michelle Donelan, the UK technology secretary, in Seoul on Wednesday.

The United States and Britain on Monday announced a new partnership on the science of artificial intelligence safety, amid growing concerns about upcoming next-generation versions. The US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, and British technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, signed a memorandum of understanding in Washington to work jointly to develop advanced AI model testing, following commitments announced at an AI safety summit in Bletchley Park in November. "We all know AI is the defining technology of our generation," Raimondo said. "This partnership will accelerate both of our institutes' work across the full spectrum to address the risks of our national security concerns and the concerns of our broader society." Under the formal partnership, Britain and the United States plan to perform at least one joint testing exercise on a publicly accessible model and are considering exploring personnel exchanges between the institutes.

The U.K. and U.S. governments announced Monday they will work together in safety testing the most powerful artificial intelligence models. An agreement, signed by Michelle Donelan, the U.K. Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, sets out a plan for collaboration between the two governments. "I think of [the agreement] as marking the next chapter in our journey on AI safety, working hand in glove with the United States government," Donelan told TIME in an interview at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. on Monday. "I see the role of the United States and the U.K. as being the real driving force in what will become a network of institutes eventually." The U.K. and U.S. AI Safety Institutes were established just one day apart, around the inaugural AI Safety Summit hosted by the U.K. government at Bletchley Park in November 2023.

The United Kingdom has unveiled plans to spend over 100 million pounds ( 125m) on research and training related to artificial intelligence (AI). Under the plans announced on Tuesday, the government will launch nine new AI research hubs across the UK, support research projects examining the responsible use of AI in education, policing and creative industries, and train regulators on managing the risks and benefits of the technology. Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan said AI had the potential to "transform our public services and the economy for the better" and produce treatments for diseases like cancer and dementia. "AI is moving fast, but we have shown that humans can move just as fast. By taking an agile, sector-specific approach, we have begun to grip the risks immediately, which in turn is paving the way for the UK to become one of the first countries in the world to reap the benefits of AI safely," Donelan said in a statement.

This week, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is hosting a group of more than 100 representatives from the worlds of business and politics to discuss the potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. The AI Safety Summit, held at Bletchley Park, UK, began on 1 November and aims to come up with a set of global principles with which to develop and deploy "frontier AI models" – the terminology favoured by Sunak and key figures in the AI industry for powerful models that don't yet exist, but may be built very soon. While the Bletchley Park event is the focal point, there is a wider week of fringe events being held in the UK, alongside a raft of UK government announcements on AI. Here are the latest developments. The key outcome of the first day of the AI Safety Summit yesterday was the Bletchley Declaration, which saw 27 countries and the European Union agree to meet more in the future to discuss the risks of AI. The UK government was keen to tout the agreement as a massive success, while impartial observers were more muted about the scale of its achievement.

This week, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is hosting a group of 100 representatives from the worlds of business and politics to discuss the potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. The AI Safety Summit, held at Bletchley Park, UK, begins on 1 November and aims to come up with a set of global principles with which to develop and deploy "frontier AI models" – the terminology favoured by Sunak and key figures in the AI industry for powerful models that don't yet exist, but may be built very soon. While the Bletchley Park event is the focal point, there is a wider week of fringe events being held in the UK, alongside a raft of UK government announcements on AI. Here are the latest developments. The summit got off to a bang with the announcement that 28 countries have agreed a declaration saying global action is needed to tamp down the risks of AI.

The UK, US, EU and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology. Twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit, hosted by the British government. The declaration does not agree to set up an international testing hub in the UK, as some in the British government had hoped. But it does provide a template for international collaboration in the future, with future safety summits now planned in South Korea in six months' time and in France in a year. The declaration says: "There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models."

No one is yet quite sure who will attend or what, if anything, will be decided, but Rishi Sunak's government is adamant that next week's AI safety summit will be a vital first step towards getting to grips with a subject that is moving at a pace even the experts cannot fully comprehend. Understandable worries inside No 10 that the Israel-Gaza war could mean a summit lacking in world leaders have eased slightly with confirmation that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, will attend. In another early victory for the UK government, a series of leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, have released their safety policies after a request from the technology secretary, Michelle Donelan. However, it remains to be seen how many top-level figures will travel to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, on Wednesday or Thursday – and if anyone at all from China will attend. The gathering at the country house, which was the base for second world war code-breaking, is a personal project for Sunak, whose speech about AI on Thursday warned about the potentially existential threats posed by the technology while also trying to reassure the public that they need not worry.

A larger-than-life Michelle Donelan beams on to a screen in Google's London headquarters. The UK science and innovation secretary is appearing via video to praise the US tech behemoth for its plans to equip workers and bosses with basic skills in artificial intelligence (AI). "The recent explosion in the use of AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard show that we are on the cusp of a new and exciting era in artificial intelligence, and it is one that will dramatically improve people's lives," says Donelan. Google's "ambitious" training programme is "so important" and "exceptional in its breadth", she gushes in a five-minute video, filmed in her ministerial office. Welcome to the AI arms race, where nations are bending over backwards to attract cash and research into the nascent technology.