AI Governance in 2026: What’s going on, why it’s a mess, and why it’s going to get messier

​Emerging technologies are always hard to govern, especially when their onset is crammed into a few intense years. With AI, policymakers, thus far, have produced more case studies in failure than success. This talk will overview the stages of governing emerging tech, the challenge that are arising, and the diverse policy strategies that governments across the world are taking. Finally, we will speculate about how things may change in the next few years and how governments will need to adapt. We will speculate about how Xi Jinping, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Bernie Sanders, and anonymous hackers may all have the potential power to “blow it up” and usher in the next messy chapter of AI governance.

​A presentation by Stephen Casper: AI safety researcher, incoming Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, current Berkman Klein fellow, and recent MIT EECS PhD; working on technical safeguards, evaluations, and governance of frontier and open-weight AI systems, and a contributing author to the International AI Safety Report and Singapore Consensus.

​Stephen will join us via video call - link will be shared the day-of for you to also join online. The event is at Ω Labs (3813 Saint-Denis).