A thought experiment for regulating AI in two distinct regimes is what I call The Island. In this scenario, experts trying to build God-like AGI systems do so in a highly secure facility: an air-gapped enclosure with the best security humans can build. All other attempts to build God-like AI would become illegal; only when such AI were provably safe could they be commercialised “off-island”. This may sound like Jurassic Park, but there is a real-world precedent for removing the profit motive from potentially dangerous research and putting it in the hands of an intergovernmental organisation. This is how Cern, which operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, has worked for almost 70 years. [...] I would support significant regulation by governments and a practical plan to transform these companies into a Cern-like organisation. (2024) source Unverified

We can’t let the same thing happen with AI. I coded the world wide web on a single computer in a small room. But that small room didn’t belong to me, it was at Cern. Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research. I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever. Regulation and global governance are technically feasible, but reliant on political willpower. If we are able to muster it, we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late. (2025) source Verified

Suppose that frontier AI development is centralized to a single project under tight international controls, with all other development banned internationally. By far the likeliest outcome of this is that we all die. A centralized group of international researchers — a “CERN for AI” — can’t align superintelligence any more than decentralized organizations can. Centralization at least has the advantage that it makes it easier to shut the remaining research down; but this advantage only helps if key decision-makers actually shut down. Rather than advocating for centralization in the hope of getting an effective moratorium, it makes far more sense to just advocate for a moratorium directly. (2025) source Unverified

It’s a CERN or DARPA for AI. Many of the US’s biggest technological innovations in the 20th century came out of the research labs at firms like AT&T, Xerox, and IBM. But those firms still had profits in their sights, not societal goals. DARPA, however, funds research that’s crucial to US national security. CERN pools billions of dollars worth of research funding that individual countries wouldn’t be able to muster alone. Public AI could do the same, giving scientists the means to do cutting-edge research and develop AI models for uses the private sector might not. For example, a specialist medical AI for public-health research, a housing AI to help solve problems of affordable housing, or a legal AI to improve the justice system. It’s a Post Office for AI. If DHL or FedEx stop serving certain areas or jack up their prices, the postal service ensures everyone will still have an affordable way to send mail. Right now, anyone who wants to use AI for free has a plethora of options, but will they always? (2025) source Unverified

In our initial report, we estimated that establishing CERN for AI requires €30–35 billion over the first three years—an investment that would yield cascading benefits for Europe’s future. The initiative would be funded primarily through core contributions from the EU, member countries, and strategic private sector partners, supplemented by program-specific industry funding, technology licensing revenue, and compute capacity rental. These resources would position Europe to lead in domains where AI capabilities could be decisive: addressing climate change, enhancing regional cybersecurity, and maintaining global competitiveness and regulatory influence. While these boards provide crucial guidance, ultimate control would remain with member countries, initially comprising EU/EEA states and trusted Horizon Europe partners like the UK, Switzerland, and Canada. A tiered membership structure could enable future broadening while protecting sensitive technology. (2025) source Unverified

At the same time, in order to reduce the probability of someone intentionally or unintentionally bringing about a rogue AI, we need to increase governance and we should consider limiting access to the large-scale generalist AI systems that could be weaponized, which would mean that the code and neural net parameters would not be shared in open-source and some of the important engineering tricks to make them work would not be shared either. Ideally this would stay in the hands of neutral international organizations (think of a combination of IAEA and CERN for AI) that develop safe and beneficial AI systems that could also help us fight rogue AIs. Reducing the flow of information would slow us down, but rogue organizations developing potentially superdangerous AI systems may also be operating in secret, and probably with less funding and fewer top-level scientists. (2023) source Unverified

The idea of just creating a bunch of big companies with venture capital behind them and they fight it out isn’t the only paradigm. [...] If Switzerland uses 10,000 of its research GPUs and Canada puts forward its research computers, and these resources are put towards open source infrastructure, then you incent researchers to work together and you get quite naturally this idea of the CERN for AI. Not because you go and build one Large Hadron Collider, but because you just pool digital resources that people are already spending money on. If you put a different technical and economic lens on how you organise the work there, Europe and potentially your collaborators are well-situated both to catch up and to leap ahead. (2025) source Unverified

The key is using data and AI, governed in a fair and democratic way, and deployed for democratic deliberation, not to increased clicks, polarising public opinions and monetizing users’ data. This is the opposite of the public interest. Europe needs a kind of “CERN” or “Manhattan Project” for artificial intelligence: A large-scale, globally cooperative effort to advance human centered AI technology under democratic control, to tackle humanity’s planetary challenges. (2023) source Verified

To secure our society's technological independence, foster innovation, and safeguard the democratic principles that underpin our way of life, we must act now. We call upon the global community, particularly the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and other willing countries, to collaborate on a monumental initiative: the establishment of an international, publicly funded, open-source supercomputing research facility. This facility, analogous to the CERN project in scale and impact, should house a diverse array of machines equipped with at least 100,000 high-performance state-of-the-art accelerators (GPUs or ASICs), operated by experts from the machine learning and supercomputing research community and overseen by democratically elected institutions in the participating nations. (2023) source Verified

Some advocates, such as computer scientist Gary Marcus, also argue that the CERN model could help advance AI safety research beyond the capacity of any one firm or nation. The new institution could bring together top talent under a mission grounded in principles of scientific openness, adherence to a pluralist view of human values (such as the collective goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), and responsible innovation. Similar sentiments have been repeated by other prominent actors in the AI governance ecosystem, including Ian Hogarth, chair of the UK’s AI Safety Institute, who argues that an international research institution offers a way to ensure safer AI research in a controlled and centralized environment without being driven by profit motive. [...] A publicly funded international research organization conducting safety research might be more resilient than private sector labs to economic pressures, and better able to avoid the risk of profit-seeking motives overriding meaningful research into AI safety measures. (2024) source Verified

Given the constraints on the current research paradigm, scientists and policy advocates are increasingly coming to the conclusion that a more collaborative and international endeavor is necessary to truly harness the power of AI and ensure it is used for beneficial purposes. Following that model, some scientists and experts like Marcus are calling for an international consortium that is focused on pure AI science and research to serve the public good. This would be a highly interdisciplinary effort that would bring together scientists from many areas, in close collaboration and interaction with industry, politics and the public. A key element would be advancing the many strands of research in this area by discussing common approaches, methods, algorithms, data and their applications. It would foster the basic foundational architecture for AI that other, smaller efforts in university and private labs could plug into. (2018) source Unverified

A CERN for AI would essentially have three functions. It would serve as a meeting place, a platform for experts to interact and exchange ideas. Second, it would offer a research environment that the various existing research centers, even the large ones, including the Max Planck Institutes, simply cannot finance on their own. Third, it would be a global magnet for talent to create an alternative to the U.S.-based big tech companies. As a public-sector institution, the Center would be accountable to the public and largely seek to solve problems in the public interest. (2023) source Unverified

Since 2018, the idea of a “CERN for AI” has been one of the signature elements of the CLAIRE vision for European excellence in AI. The time has come for large-scale and effective investment into publicly owned and operated AI infrastructure, along with cutting-edge research and pre-competitive development capabilities. Now is the time to create a “CERN for AI”! (2024) source Unverified

I have talked about having something like a CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] for AI, which might focus on AI safety. In some industries, we know how to make reliable [products], usually only in narrow domains. One example is bridges: You can't guarantee that a bridge will never fall down, but you can say that, unless there’s an earthquake of a certain magnitude that only happens once every century, we're confident the bridge will still stand. Our bridges don't fall down often anymore. But for AI, we can’t do that at all as an engineering practice—it’s like alchemy. There’s no guarantee that any of it works. So, you could imagine an international consortium trying to either fix the current systems, which I think, in historical perspective, will seem mediocre, or build something better that does offer those guarantees. Many of the big technologies that we have around, from the internet to space ships, were government-funded in the past; it's a myth that in America innovation only comes from the free market. source Unverified