The Future of the AI Summit Series

This is a link post for a paper which was led by researchers from the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, and on which IAPS researcher Oliver Guest was one of the authors.

The AI Summit series – initiated at Bletchley Park in 2023 and continuing through Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025 – has become a distinct forum for international collaboration on AI governance. Its early achievements, including the Bletchley Declaration, the Frontier AI Safety Commitments, and the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI, are a result of its unique format, regular schedule, and ability to secure concrete commitments from governments and industry.

To ensure its continuing impact, the Summit series must now transition from an improvised sequence of summits towards a more formalized structure. For this evolution to succeed, organizers must carefully examine past successes and realistically assess future challenges. This report examines both, with particular attention to a set of core summit design elements: hosting arrangement, secretariat format, participant selection, agenda setting, and summit frequency. Based on this analysis, we present six recommendations to strengthen the summit series’ impact.

The paper draws on existing international governance models to offer recommendations for each design element, addressing challenges such as a crowded summit landscape, geopolitical shifts, and rapid technological change.