In 2025, global AI innovation is like a button pressed and stuck on fast forward. As much as those within academia, R&D, PhD labs, and think tanks desire to hit pause, stopping is no longer an option.
The collective voice urging the immediate implementation of frontier model safety guardrails, agentic and robotic safeguards, risk mitigation, and environmental sustainability is being drowned out. A deafening roar from industry lobbyists was heard, coupled with sovereign AI and national self-interest governments amplifying their voices in the wake of the U.S. administration’s newly announced AI dominance posture, promoting "human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security."
IASEAI—an independent organization committed to ensuring advanced AI systems operate safely and ethically, benefiting all of humanity—launched its premier summit at the OECD in advance of the Paris AI Action Summit. Both early February 2025 events featured an intellectual diversity of expert perspectives straining to be heard over the billion-dollar investment engines purring in the background. Money and special interests powered numerous national AI innovation strategies, opportunity plans, and massive data center infrastructure expansion. While France's President Macron shied away from concentrating the Paris AI Action Summit around AI risk in pursuit of more practical "solutions and standards," AI safety was at center stage among IASEAI summit plenary-breakout session speakers and attendee hallway conversations.
Professor Yoshua Bengio posed the question of whether the world can reap the scientific benefits of AI without the risks of autonomous agents. He highlighted how frontier models are capable of in-context scheming, attempting to escape when told they are being replaced, and cheating in a game when they know they would lose against a more powerful opponent—going against their own training. Google’s DeepMind Safety & Alignment Head, Anca Dragan, acknowledged a lack of standardization across evaluations and thresholds for assessing frontier models for dangerous capabilities. She added that a kill switch or null actions aren’t always the right solution and do not guarantee agentic safety because misaligned systems are incentivized to avoid shutdown through self-preservation.
Scholar, professor, and author Kate Crawford voiced concern about the planetary costs of scaling AI, providing evidence ranging from non-renewable extractive resource infrastructure to vast energy and water footprints. Hugging Face encouraged companies to be more transparent about the significant environmental impact of AI development by calculating and sharing CO₂ emissions and their carbon footprint. Nobel Peace Prize winner and Filipina-American journalist Maria Ressa emphasized the importance of safeguarding democracy in the age of AI media and digital disinformation.
Notable IASEAI AI product safety breakout sessions ushered in equal technical awareness and alarm. Global standard risk-based frameworks and agile regulation efforts struggle to keep pace with AI’s rapid evolution. Jamie Fernandez Fisac, a professor at Princeton’s Engineering and Safety Robotics Laboratory, noted that current AI guardrails probably won’t work because "they are missing the fundamentals of safety-critical decision-making." He explained that AI guardrails lack three crucial elements: dynamic operation (the safety of an AI output depends on future outcomes through processes already in motion), interaction (safety is not solely a property of AI; it depends on feedback loops with human users), and criticality (statistical methods and assurances become ill-conditioned under catastrophic failure). What risks do we overlook when we shortsightedly focus guardrails around general-purpose AI’s individual output rather than broader societal outcomes?
Carnegie Mellon postdoc Alex Robey’s presentation, "Would You Trust AI to Control This Robot?," outlined the LLM→agent→robot evolution and revealed the relative ease of jailbreaking current AI models and AI-controlled robots. The 2023 Bletchley Park inaugural AI Safety Summit, which promised global framework consensus around the safe development and deployment of AI, now feels like a distant dream.
Harmonization efforts in AI global governance and policy continue to be well-intentioned, evidenced by the fact that India, China, and over 50 countries signed the Paris AI Action Summit final declaration, even despite the U.S. and U.K. opting out. However, AI is becoming increasingly complex and technically opaque—more so now than ever before. Experts at IASEAI and the Paris AI Action Summit humbly admit that verifiable explainability, interpretability, and environmental traceability may no longer be feasible given AI’s hyperspeed deployment. The growing uncomprehension and unease could be a contributing factor to the vast divisions on the optimal way to govern AI among public interest advocates, AI “capitalism at all costs” profiteers, NGOs, and nation-state leadership.
Additionally, AI risk mitigation and compliance momentum are increasingly regarded as a tax rather than a moral humanitarian imperative. Emerging AI governance researcher Dean Ball observed, "AI policy often finds itself with a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: businesses do not know how to comply, and policymakers do not know how to describe what compliance looks like in an objective way. In the European Union, process-based compliance of this kind has been estimated to function almost like a tax on AI spending, adding 5-17% in compliance costs to any corporate use of AI."
In this new era, is it possible to accelerate AI innovation in a cost-effective, ethical, safe, and sustainable way? Time will tell.
Photo Credit: iaseai.org
