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Asilomar AI Principles
The twenty-three principles developed at the 2017 Future of Life Institute conference at Asilomar, California—the first broadly endorsed international framework for beneficial AI development.
The Asilomar AI Principles are twenty-three guidelines for beneficial AI development, produced at a January 2017 conference organized by the Future of Life Institute at Asilomar State Beach, California. The conference brought together AI researchers, ethicists, economists, and policymakers including Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, and over a thousand subsequent signatories. The Principles cover research issues (funding, culture, science-policy link), ethics and values (safety, transparency, responsibility, human values), and longer-term issues (capability caution, importance, risks, recursive self-improvement, common good). The Asilomar location was deliberately chosen to echo the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, which established biotechnology safety norms that endured for decades.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Principles represented the first broadly endorsed international framework for AI development, emerging from a moment when the field was sophisticated enough to require shared norms but not yet so competitive that coordination had become impossible. The conference produced genuine technical debate and reached consensus on principles that most