What happened
The second International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety (ISESEA II), co-convened by Singapore's IMDA and AI Safety Institute alongside over 100 contributors from 13 countries — spanning frontier labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta), government safety institutes (UK AISI, Korea AI Safety Institute, EU AI Office), and academia (Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Dawn Song) — released the 2026 edition of the Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities. Building on the 2025 report, the 2026 edition adds a fourth pillar dedicated to societal resilience and a companion report specifically addressing the risks of increasingly autonomous AI agents. The report presents a global technical research agenda intended to guide safety research investment across the frontier AI ecosystem as agentic capabilities scale. It reflects the broadest cross-national scientific consensus document on AI safety research priorities to date, bridging US, Chinese, and European technical safety communities.
Why it matters
This is the closest thing to a global technical roadmap for AI safety research that spans US, Chinese, and European frontier labs and safety institutes simultaneously — CISOs and safety leads should map their internal research agendas against its four pillars, especially the new agentic-risk and societal-resilience additions, to benchmark against where the field's leading technical safety community is directing effort.
Action needed
Brief technical AI safety and red-teaming teams on the four pillars (especially the new agentic-risk and societal-resilience additions) and assess internal research alignment against the consensus priorities.