International Institutions for Advanced AI
Authors: name: Lewis Ho; name: Joslyn Barnhart; name: Robert Trager; name: Yoshua Bengio; name: Miles Brundage; name: Allison Carnegie; name: Rumman Chowdhury; name: Allan Dafoe; name: Gillian Hadfield; name: Margaret Levi; name: Duncan Snidal
Published: 2023-07-10 16:55:55

Abstract: International institutions may have an important role to play in ensuring
advanced AI systems benefit humanity. International collaborations can unlock
AI's ability to further sustainable development, and coordination of regulatory
efforts can reduce obstacles to innovation and the spread of benefits.
Conversely, the potential dangerous capabilities of powerful and
general-purpose AI systems create global externalities in their development and
deployment, and international efforts to further responsible AI practices could
help manage the risks they pose. This paper identifies a set of governance
functions that could be performed at an international level to address these
challenges, ranging from supporting access to frontier AI systems to setting
international safety standards. It groups these functions into four
institutional models that exhibit internal synergies and have precedents in
existing organizations: 1) a Commission on Frontier AI that facilitates expert
consensus on opportunities and risks from advanced AI, 2) an Advanced AI
Governance Organization that sets international standards to manage global
threats from advanced models, supports their implementation, and possibly
monitors compliance with a future governance regime, 3) a Frontier AI
Collaborative that promotes access to cutting-edge AI, and 4) an AI Safety
Project that brings together leading researchers and engineers to further AI
safety research. We explore the utility of these models and identify open
questions about their viability.