Saudi SDAIA helps draft 2026 International AI Safety Report for second year

Saudi Arabia’s SDAIA securing a recurring role in drafting the International AI Safety Report underlines how quickly Gulf states are inserting themselves into the governance side of the AI race, not just compute and capital. The report is one of the few attempts to aggregate expert views on frontier risk trajectories and safety practices into something policymakers can act on. Having non‑Western actors at the table reduces the chance that AI safety is seen as an exclusively US‑UK‑EU project and increases the likelihood that emerging‑market perspectives on economic development, data sovereignty and talent will shape the recommendations.

From a Race to AGI perspective, the key question is how binding or operational these reports will become. If they remain high‑level diagnostics, frontier labs will treat them as background noise. But if Gulf states and other signatories start conditioning cloud incentives, investment or market access on adherence to the report’s recommendations—around red‑teaming, model evaluation, deployment gating or incident reporting—that could gradually harden into a de facto global governance layer. Saudi participation also signals that states betting heavily on sovereign AI infrastructure want to be seen as responsible stewards, not just aggressive deployers.