Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI

Participants at the Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI

The Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI was a conference organized by the Future of Life Institute,^[1] held January 5–8, 2017, at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California. More than 100 thought leaders and researchers in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy met at the conference, to address and formulate principles of beneficial AI.^[2] Its outcome was the creation of a set of guidelines for AI research – the 23 Asilomar AI Principles.^[3]

The 23 principles, published as an open letter, received signatures from 1797 AI–Robotics researchers and 3923 others. Notable signatures included: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, executive director of the ACLU Anthony D. Romero, Dutch politician Kees Verhoeven, British tech entrepreneur Tabitha Goldstaub, American filmmaker James Barrat, CEO of Google Deepmind Demis Hassabis, AI researchers Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, philosophers Sam Harris and Will MacAskill, and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, amongst others.^[4][5][3]

References

1. Losey, Ralph (August 11, 2017). "Future of Life Institute 2017 Asilomar Conference". AI Ethics. Retrieved July 31, 2025.
2. "Beneficial AI conference develops Asilomar AI principles to guide future AI research". The Kurzweil Library. Retrieved July 31, 2025.
3. "Asilomar AI Principles". Future of Life Institute. Retrieved September 24, 2024.
4. Truong, Kevin; Bote, Joshua (November 18, 2023). "How OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Was Fired by Rival Board Members". The San Francisco Standard. Retrieved September 24, 2024.
5. Cuthbertson, Anthony (January 31, 2017). "Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Warn of AI Arms Race". Newsweek. Retrieved September 24, 2024.

Further reading

• Alexander, Scott (February 7, 2017). "Notes From The Asilomar Conference On Beneficial AI". Slate Star Codex.
• Olivér, Gábor (2022). Critique of the Asilomar AI Principles (PDF). GeniaNet. doi:10.15170/COTAAP-2022. ISBN 978-615-5687-04-4.
• Nazir, Saddat (June 27, 2024). "The Asilomar Conference and Contemporary AI Controversies: Lessons in Regulation". Harvard International Review.
• Inshakova, Agnessa O.; Deryugina, Tatiana V.; et al. (2025). "Asilomar Principles for the Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence in the IT Sector of the Economy". In Inshakova, Agnessa; et al. (eds.). LegalTech and Legal-AI in Business. Intelligent Systems Reference Library. Vol. 276. Springer. pp. 3–13. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-93474-2_1. ISBN 978-3-031-93473-5.