The 2026 International AI Safety Report, published last week by over 100 experts from more than 30 countries, reaches a sobering conclusion: the gap between the pace of AI advancement and our ability to implement effective safeguards remains a critical challenge. The report’s chair, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, put it plainly: international agreement on AI governance is now in the rational interest of every country, “exactly what has happened with the management of nuclear risks.”

This isn’t abstract. Indeed, we already have a case study in what happens when that coordination doesn’t exist.

In late December, xAI’s chatbot Grok began generating thousands of sexualized images per hour, including of minors. Users discovered they could upload photographs of real people and instruct the AI to “undress” them. Governments issued statements and regulators announced investigations. But nobody stopped it.

What followed was a textbook case of fragmented response. Malaysia and Indonesia banned Grok outright. Britain accelerated enforcement of new laws and launched an Ofcom investigation. France widened an existing inquiry. India demanded compliance reports. Brazil called for a nationwide suspension. The European Commission ordered X to preserve all internal documents. California’s attorney general sent a cease-and-desist letter. Fifty-seven members of the European Parliament called for AI Act bans on “nudification” tools. US senators wrote to Apple and Google requesting the removal of X from app stores.

xAI’s response was to comply “in jurisdictions where it is illegal.” This was telling because they were saying the quiet part out loud. The company would do the minimum required, country by country, because no coordinated international standard exists to require otherwise.

The problem here is not a lack of concern; after all, every major jurisdiction responded within days. The issue is that AI systems operate globally while governance remains national and largely uncoordinated. Each country acted according to its own timeline, legal framework and enforcement capacity. None could act decisively on behalf of others and so what resulted was a patchwork.

This is a clear failure of infrastructure rather than political will. The diplomatic channels for rapid, coordinated international response to AI harms simply don’t exist. When Indonesia banned Grok, it could not compel action elsewhere. When Britain’s Ofcom demanded answers, its jurisdiction ended at the Channel. And when California’s attorney general invoked state law, he was one voice among many.

Some will object that the United States presents a special case. Free speech protections there make content regulation genuinely difficult, and reasonable people disagree about where to draw lines. This is true. But the Grok incident was not about speech at the margins. Non-consensual intimate imagery of children is not protected expression anywhere. This was, in every sense, an easy case. And the global response still failed.

That should concern us. Indeed, if this is how we handle situations where everyone agrees that something is wrong, what happens when the questions get harder?

The coordination failures visible in Grok exist across the AI landscape—and the new International AI Safety Report documents them in detail. Competitive pressure pushes labs to ship faster and cut safety corners, even when individual leaders would prefer to be cautious. No credible mechanism exists to verify claims about model capabilities, training runs, or safety measures, which makes mutual trust and treaties difficult to sustain. Frontier labs lack standardized protocols for reporting serious incidents, so problems stay siloed until they become public scandals.

The stakes will only increase. The report notes that current AI systems can already assist non-experts in designing dangerous biological agents—with 23% of the highest-performing biological AI tools having high misuse potential—and are being adapted into semi-autonomous cyber attackers. These are documented capabilities. This means the question is less about whether harder cases will arrive and more about whether the infrastructure to address them will exist when they do.

International coordination forums are sometimes dismissed as talk shops where diplomats exchange pleasantries while real power lies elsewhere. This criticism misses the point. Of course dialogue alone cannot and does not solve problems. But without trusted channels between governments, industry and civil society, we will keep watching harms unfold with no mechanism to respond collectively.

Several efforts are underway and there is precedent for success. In 2023, sixteen major AI companies including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI signed on to voluntary safety commitments coordinated by the White House, agreeing to shared standards on security testing, information sharing, and content watermarking. The Frontier Model Forum emerged from that process to develop industry-wide safety practices. More recently, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is developing technical standards for authenticating AI-generated media.

The findings of the International AI Safety Report will inform discussions at the India AI Impact Summit from 16 to 20 February—the fourth major international AI safety summit after Bletchley Park, Seoul, and Paris. As the report’s authors note, “The value of this Report is not only in the findings it presents, but in the example it sets of working together to navigate shared challenges.” That example needs to become the norm.

The alternative is to continue as we are: responding to each incident ad hoc, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, while AI systems advance faster than our collective capacity to govern them. That path leads to a world where the most permissive rules set the floor, where companies arbitrage between regulatory regimes, and where the next Grok-style incident is merely a preview of worse to come.

Many will see the Grok incident as an aberration. But we see it as a demonstration. The technology worked as designed, the harms were predictable, and the global response was exactly what the current system allows—which is to say, not much. Whether we build the coordination capacity to respond differently next time is a choice. And it is one we must make now.

 

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