Discussion Group - Why AI governance matters
About this event
Week 1 of a four-week AI governance discussion series, alongside the SAIN Utrecht lecture course on AI governance (November–December 2026). Each session builds on the lecture of the week before, but stands on its own, so join one or all.
Week 1 | Why AI governance matters (24 Nov)
Week 2 | Who shapes AI governance (1 Dec)
Week 3 | What policymakers act on (8 Dec)
Week 4 | Europe and the Netherlands (15 Dec)
Governance or technical safety, and why now?
Last Wednesday's lecture introduced AI governance and its main risks: misuse, loss of control and concentration of power. This week we ask how governance and technical safety depend on each other: which rules can only work if a technical tool exists to check them, such as evaluations, interpretability or monitoring, and what governance adds that technical safety cannot. We also ask whether the public can see enough inside AI labs to judge the risks. We pair the lecture readings with a short Science paper by 25 leading scientists from the US, Europe and China, including Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, which sets out technical research and governance measures side by side.
