The Future of the AI Summit Series: One Year Later

15 July 2026

Lucia Velasco, Reed Schuler, Robert Trager, Yoshua Bengio, Julia Morse, Benjamin Prud'homme, Joslyn Barnhart, Jonathan Barry, Roxana Radu, Stephen Casper, Ranjit Lall, Duncan Cass-Beggs, Charles Martinet, Daniel Zhang

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A year after The Future of the AI Summit Series (January 2025), the international landscape for AI governance has evolved significantly. The United Nations has established a Global Dialogue on AI Governance, frontier AI capabilities have advanced rapidly, and the AI Summit Series has expanded in both scale and global participation. The Paris (2025) and Delhi (2026) summits demonstrated growing international engagement, leading to the New Delhi Declaration and the announcement of future hosts through 2028. Yet, despite this momentum, the series continues to rely on informal governance structures, host-driven agendas, and an ad hoc secretariat, limiting its long-term policy impact. This update revisits the recommendations of the original memo, assesses progress to date, and argues that the next phase of the Summit Series should focus on institutional maturity. In particular, it renews the case for a two-track participation model, a more durable secretariat, coordinated agenda-setting, and complementary technical meetings to ensure that expanding public engagement does not come at the expense of sustained work on frontier AI governance.