International Dialogues on AI Safety (IDAIS)

The International Dialogues on AI Safety (IDAIS) is a series of high-level convenings that brings together the world's most prominent AI scientists and governance experts to address extreme risks from advanced artificial intelligence. The initiative is the flagship program of the Safe AI Forum (SAIF), a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit that was initially incubated at FAR.AI and became an independent organization in May 2025. IDAIS was launched on October 31, 2023, with its inaugural dialogue at Ditchley Park near Oxford, UK. The meeting was convened by Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Andrew Yao, UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell, and Ya-Qin Zhang, founding Dean of the Tsinghua Institute for AI Industry Research. The initiative was co-developed by Fynn Heide and Conor McGurk, who went on to co-found the Safe AI Forum. Four major dialogues have been held to date. IDAIS-Oxford (October 2023) established the foundation, calling for mandatory registration of frontier AI models, independent third-party audits, and a commitment by developers to spend at least one-third of AI R&D budgets on safety. IDAIS-Beijing (March 2024), held at the Aman Summer Palace in partnership with the Beijing Academy of AI, brought together scientists including Hinton, Bengio, and Yao alongside governance experts to establish red lines for AI development, advocating for prohibitions on systems that can autonomously replicate, improve, seek power, or deceive their creators. IDAIS-Venice (September 2024), held at the Berggruen Institute's Casa dei Tre Oci in collaboration with the Berggruen Institute, framed AI safety as a global public good and called for emergency preparedness agreements, safety assurance frameworks, and independent global research. IDAIS-Shanghai (July 2025), in partnership with the Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute and the Shanghai AI Laboratory, focused on the emerging evidence of AI deception and strategies to maintain human control over advanced AI systems. Each dialogue produces a consensus statement signed by participants, which outlines shared goals and specific policy recommendations. These statements have been covered by major outlets including the Financial Times and The New York Times. SAIF also published a comprehensive Policy Guide in February 2025 connecting the dialogue recommendations to direct policy actions for policymakers, philanthropists, companies, and researchers. A distinctive feature of IDAIS is its success in bridging Western and Chinese AI research communities. The dialogues regularly include prominent scientists from both sides, fostering rare direct collaboration on AI safety between researchers who might otherwise have limited channels for engagement on these issues. Notable participants across the dialogue series include Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Andrew Yao, as well as Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Dan Hendrycks, Mary Robinson, Gillian Hadfield, and many others from leading institutions worldwide.