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Bletchley Declaration

4 min readUpdated October 2026
Bletchley Declaration
Full name
The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023
Signed
1 November 2023
Venue
Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom
Signatories
28 countries plus the European Union; 29 plus the EU after New Zealand joined in October 2024
Legal status
Non-binding political declaration
Related
AI Safety Summit, EU AI Act, ASEAN AI Governance Guidelines
The Bletchley Declaration is a non-binding international political statement on the safety of frontier artificial intelligence. It was agreed on 1 November 2023 by 28 countries and the European Union at the first global AI Safety Summit, held at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom. The declaration was the first international AI text signed jointly by the United States and China, and the first to record a shared government-level recognition that the most capable general-purpose AI models may pose risks of "serious, even catastrophic, harm".[1]

Background

The AI Safety Summit was convened by the United Kingdom government and held over two days on 1–2 November 2023 at Bletchley Park, the wartime estate where British codebreakers deciphered German Enigma traffic. Around 150 representatives from national governments, industry, academia and civil society attended, including United States Vice President Kamala Harris and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; the summit was chaired by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.[2] The meeting followed the rapid release of increasingly capable general-purpose models during 2023, which pushed questions of frontier AI — highly capable general-purpose systems that may outstrip existing national regulation — onto the international agenda.[3]

Content and commitments

The declaration runs to roughly 1,300 words with no annexes. It affirms that AI should be designed, developed, deployed and used in a way that is safe, human-centric, trustworthy and responsible; recognises both the opportunities of AI for public services, science and the Sustainable Development Goals, and its risks, including malicious use, loss of control and societal harms such as fraud and misinformation; and commits signatories to identify risks of shared concern, to build evidence-based national approaches to safety, and to maintain an inclusive global dialogue thereafter.[1][4]

The declaration creates no legal obligation: it establishes no enforcement body, imposes no duties on governments or AI developers, and produces no treaty. Its function is diplomatic — establishing a common vocabulary and a continuing process of cooperation while expressly allowing national approaches to differ.[4] Signatories are listed alphabetically, from Australia to the United States, and include Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore alongside major economies such as Brazil, India, China, Japan and the European Union. Russia was not invited, and Vietnam, Mexico and Argentina did not sign. New Zealand added its signature on 23 October 2024, bringing the total to 29 countries plus the EU.[4][5]

Legacy and successor summits

The summit announced the United Kingdom's AI Safety Institute, and the United States established a comparable body days later. A second summit followed in Seoul in May 2024, co-hosted with the Republic of Korea, producing the Seoul Declaration and voluntary Frontier AI Safety Commitments under which major laboratories published frontier safety frameworks. The sequence of summits also gave rise to a growing network of national AI Safety Institutes.[2][3]

>See Also

🇲🇾Malaysian Context

🇲🇾 Malaysia was not among the signatories of the Bletchley Declaration, while ASEAN neighbours Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines all signed on 1 November 2023.[1] Malaysia's contribution to frontier-AI governance has instead been channelled through domestic and regional instruments: the National Guidelines on AI Governance & Ethics (AIGE) issued by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) on 20 September 2024, the ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics adopted in February 2024, and the National AI Office (NAIO) established under the Ministry of Digital in December 2024.[6]

The declaration's substance still reaches Malaysia. The country hosts a rapidly expanding concentration of AI data centres, particularly in Johor and the Klang Valley, that support training and inference for frontier models developed elsewhere; and Malaysian banks, telecoms and public-sector agencies that procure frontier model APIs increasingly inherit vendor safety commitments written into the Seoul Frontier AI Safety Commitments. For regulators — MDEC, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Personal Data Protection Department — the practical legacy of Bletchley is the expectation of documented risk assessment, incident reporting and human oversight, themes that feed directly into AIGE, the Malaysia AI Governance Framework and ISO/IEC 42001 adoption by local enterprises.[6]

References

  1. ↑UK Government. (2023). The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-2023-the-bletchley-declaration/the-bletchley-declaration-by-countries-attending-the-ai-safety-summit-1-2-november-2023
  2. ↑The Lancet Digital Health. (2024). Crossing the frontier: the first global AI safety summit. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(24)00001-3/fulltext
  3. ↑UK Government. (2023). AI Safety Summit 2023: introduction. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-introduction/ai-safety-summit-introduction-html
  4. ↑Humanity & AI Safety Accord. (2026). The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit — participation record. https://aiaccords.org/agreements/bletchley-declaration
  5. ↑bletchleydeclaration.com. The Bletchley Declaration — text, signatories and legacy. https://bletchleydeclaration.com
  6. ↑Richard Wee Chambers. (2025). Artificial Intelligence Governance in Focus: Malaysia's National Guidelines on AI Governance and Ethics vs the European Union's AI Act. https://richardweechambers.com/artificial-intelligence-governance-in-focus-malaysias-national-guidelines-on-ai-governance-and-ethics-vs-the-european-unions-ai-act
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