Context: 28 countries recently signed the first International declaration to address the risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, London.

About the Bletchley Park Declaration

• It was signed by 28 major countries, including the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, India, and the European Union.

• It aimed to establish a shared understanding of the opportunities and risks associated with frontier AI, and global action to tackle them.

• Frontier AI is defined as highly capable foundation generative AI models that could possess dangerous capabilities that can pose severe risks to public safety.

• The substantial risks of intentional misuse and unintended control issues of frontier AI included fields like cybersecurity, biotechnology, and disinformation.

• It acknowledged the potential for severe harm (deliberate or unintentional) arising from AI models, and risks related to bias and privacy.

• It drew global leaders, computer scientists, and tech executives, resulting in a groundbreaking agreement.

Significance

• It acknowledges the potential for severe, even catastrophic, harm caused by AI, whether intentional or unintentional.

• It highlights the importance of safeguarding human rights, transparency, explainability, fairness, accountability, regulation, safety, human oversight, ethics, bias mitigation, privacy, and data protection.

Challenges

• It reflects the complex negotiations between nations with conflicting interests and legal systems, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and China.

Approaches by different Countries

• Policymakers worldwide have increased regulatory scrutiny of generative AI tools, with concerns related to privacy, system bias, and intellectual property rights.

• South Korea would co-host a virtual AI summit, and France will host an in-person summit for the same to foster international cooperation against these risks.

• European Union: It proposed a new AI Act that classifies AI according to use-case scenarios, based broadly on the degree of invasiveness and risk.

• United Kingdom: A “light-touch” approach would be implemented that aims to foster innovation in this field.

• U.S.A: A Rulebook for AI Regulation based on the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.

• China: Introduced measures to regulate AI under law.

• India: There was a shift in India’s stance from not considering legal intervention in AI regulation to actively formulating regulations based on a risk-based, user-harm approach.

• The terms for mitigation shall be formulated and observe AI through the prism of openness, safety, trust, and accountability.

• Digital India Bill was introduced to replace Information Technology Act, 2000, for issue-specific regulations for each of these intermediaries.

• NITI Aayog published a series of papers on Responsible AI for All.

Other Key Facts

• Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire near London was once the top-secret base of codebreakers who cracked the German ‘Enigma Code’, hastening the end of World War II.

• The Enigma machine was a code-generating machine used by the German military during World War II to encode strategic messages.

• Alan Turing and his team broke this code and, later formed the basis of modern electronic computing.