AI Seoul Summit 2024

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The AI Seoul Summit 2024 convened in South Korea in May 2024, organized jointly by the South Korean and British governments. Seated alongside world leaders were Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong. Their presence together was not coincidental. How had the international community come to agree that artificial intelligence required this level of shared attention? And what, concretely, would those gathered in Seoul commit themselves to doing? The conversation had roots in work the United Kingdom had already begun just months before.

  1235

• 2. From Bletchley to Seoul

  ›

  In November 2023, the AI Safety Summit met at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom. The participating countries left with the Bletchley Declaration, committing themselves to identifying AI safety risks of shared concern. That was a starting framework, not a finished answer.

  Seoul built on what Bletchley had started. The leaders gathered in South Korea recognized not only AI's risks but also its potential benefits. The shift was visible in the Seoul summit's framing. Safety remained central, but the agenda now acknowledged that AI could be a positive force as well. That wider view would shape the documents the summit produced. The Seoul summit's formal outputs would ultimately bear the signatures of nations well beyond the circle that had gathered at Bletchley.

  1267

• 3. Leaders and Executives

  ›

  Group of Seven nations sent representatives to the AI Seoul Summit 2024, including delegations from the United States, Canada, France, and Germany. South Korea, Singapore, and Australia also sent participants. The United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the European Union were each represented as well.

  OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, attended alongside Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Naver, identified at the summit as South Korea's top portal operator, also took part. This combination of public and private power around the same agenda was not coincidental: the technology being governed was largely in corporate hands. What would emerge from those deliberations was a commitment to AI governance frameworks capable of working across national boundaries.

  2357

• 4. The Seoul Declaration

  ›

  The Seoul Declaration for Safe, Innovative and Inclusive AI was adopted at the summit by eleven national governments and the European Union. Signatories included the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. At its core was a commitment to AI governance frameworks designed to work across national borders.

  The Hiroshima Process International Code of Conduct for Organizations Developing Advanced AI Systems provided one of the declaration's structural mechanisms. Rather than building a governance architecture entirely from scratch, the signatories incorporated a code of conduct that already existed. The declaration also called for AI development to be human-centered. That work was to be pursued through collaboration with the private sector, academia, and civil society. A second, broader statement signed at the same summit extended those commitments to a far wider group of countries.

  2367

• 5. The Ministerial Statement

  ›

  The Seoul Ministerial Statement for Advancing AI Safety was adopted at the ministerial meeting of the summit. Its roster of signatories was far longer than the Seoul Declaration's. Chile, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ukraine were among the more than two dozen nations that signed, alongside an EU representative.

  Low-power chip development was named in the statement as a direct priority. As AI systems expanded, their energy demands were expected to grow massively. The ministers recognized that hardware efficiency was a governance concern, not just an engineering one.

  Minister of Science Lee Jong-ho stated that South Korea planned to open an AI Safety Institute in 2024. The country also intended to join an international network dedicated to global AI safety. Lee Jong-ho expressed his intention to advance international cooperation on AI standards. The next gathering in the summit series was already on the calendar: the AI Action Summit, scheduled for Paris, France, in 2025.

  8941