WIC holds seminar on global AI safety and governance report

A seminar on the draft report "Advancing a Global Framework of AI Safety and Governance for the Well-being of Humanity" under the AI Safety and Governance Program of the World Internet Conference (WIC) Specialized Committee on Artificial Intelligence (SC on AI）was held in Beijing on Sept 12.

Representatives from the committee and more than 30 leading experts and scholars in the field of AI worldwide participate in the seminar both online and offline to view and discuss the draft.

The meeting was chaired by Zeng Yi, who serves as co-chair of the WIC SC on AI and co-lead of the AI Safety and Governance Program, dean of Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, and director of the International Research Center for AI Ethics and Governance of the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He provided an overview of the research process and main contents of the report. 

The draft analyzes global safety and governance risks in AI development, reviews multilateral mechanisms and global practices, and proposes ideas and measures for building a global AI safety and governance system to ensure AI is safe, inclusive, accountable and aligned with multilateralism.

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, co-lead of the AI Safety and Governance Program of the WIC SC on AI and director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility Programme at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, together with WIC officials, summarized the discussions. 

During the discussion, experts and scholars from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, University of Münster, University of Southampton, University of Cambridge, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Lingnan University, Sina Weibo, Tsinghua University, Tencent Research Institute, China Mobile Research Institute, MiniMax, China Unicom Digital Technology Co., Ltd., the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and DAS-Security, among other institutions, engaged in thorough discussions on the content of the report.

The participating experts agreed that the current draft provides a systematic overview of the global landscape and key challenges in AI governance. It identifies critical issues that a global AI safety and governance framework should address, proposes corresponding response mechanisms and has made significant progress in clarifying the objectives, overall architecture and priority tasks of such a system.

The experts suggested that the report could further deepen its analysis of the commonalities and differences in existing international governance practices. Building on this, more targeted and operational institutional recommendations and mechanism designs should be proposed. They also emphasized the need to better balance policy foresight with feasibility to strengthen the report's global applicability and its ability to guide international consensus building.

A relevant official from the WIC said the drafting team will systematically review and incorporate the feedback to further improve the report, with the final version to be released at the 2025 Wuzhen Summit.