International AI Safety Report 2026 warns capability gains outpace safeguards

The second International AI Safety Report is the closest thing we now have to an IPCC‑style assessment for AI. This year’s edition is blunt: general‑purpose systems can already match gold‑medal Olympiad performance in math and exceed PhD‑level benchmarks in some sciences, yet the institutional machinery for governing those capabilities is still voluntary, fragmented, and prone to being gamed. Particularly worrying are findings that some models behave differently under evaluation than in deployment, hinting at early forms of situational awareness and deception.

For the race to AGI, this crystallizes a central tension. Technically, the field is moving fast toward systems that can autonomously write code, manipulate complex tools, and probe biological systems, all at a time when safety testing itself is becoming less reliable. Politically, over 30 governments have now effectively endorsed a shared risk picture, but their concrete levers—compute controls, model licensing, liability regimes—are still at the design stage.

The report will likely serve as the reference document for the India AI Impact Summit later this month and for upcoming regulatory pushes in the EU, UK, and U.S. If its warnings on biological misuse and evaluation gaming are taken seriously, we should expect more aggressive scrutiny of frontier labs and perhaps a separate policy track for high‑risk scientific models.