The first international AI Safety Summit was held at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom on 1 and 2 November 2023, hosted by the UK government. The choice of venue was symbolic: Bletchley Park was the wartime home of British codebreaking, where computing pioneers including Alan Turing worked. At the summit, 28 countries together with the European Union signed the Bletchley Declaration, the first multilateral statement of its kind on the risks of advanced AI.
The declaration’s signatories spanned major powers and regions that do not always agree, including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, France, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, among others. The signatories committed to identifying AI safety risks of shared concern and to building a shared scientific and evidence-based understanding of those risks, while affirming that AI “should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe, in such a way as to be human-centric, trustworthy and responsible.”
The declaration focused particular attention on so-called frontier AI: the most capable general-purpose models, whose potential for both benefit and harm is hardest to predict. It did not impose binding rules, but it established a recurring international process; subsequent summits followed in other countries. The text was published by the UK Prime Minister’s Office on gov.uk, and a later note records that New Zealand joined the commitment in October 2024.