The Hallway Track

World Economic Forum AI Sessions

policy geopolitics sovereign-ai

Dates
2026-01-20 → 2026-01-24
Location
Davos, Switzerland
Ecosystem
policy governance
Importance
8/10

Related coverage & signals

[AINews] not much happened today

Clement Delangue · Latent Space Blog · Jul 21, 2026

US may ban Chinese open-weight AI models as Hugging Face discloses using open models for cyber defense

[AINews] Fearing RSI: OpenAI, Anthropic, GDM, Meta, Thinky cosign letter to "Pace" AI development, as HuggingFace details Machine-Speed Offensive Cyberattack

Elon Musk · Latent Space Blog · Jul 29, 2026

1,171 frontier AI employees urge U.S. government to internationally pace automated AI development

“AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?

Simon Willison · Jul 20, 2026

Ben Thompson proposes US law legalizing AI training data collection and distillation to compete with China

“The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum.”
Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake

Sam Altman · Interconnects · Jun 19, 2026

Regulating or banning open source AI would be a grave mistake for the US.

“Open source – simply a process that allows technology to be shared, built, and distributed publicly and transparently – is safe, secure, and drives economic growth.”
The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense

Simon Willison · Jun 16, 2026

Fable 5 export controls wrongly ban defensive AI security work mislabeled as a jailbreak.

“That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.”
The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken

Nathan Lambert · Interconnects · Oct 06, 2026

Banning open-weight models will hurt US AI competitiveness while increasing long-term cyber risk

“I feel we're going to end up making policy decisions that both limit American AI competitiveness and increases long-term cyber risk.”
Import AI 468: 23 RSI ideas; PostTrainBench+; and how trust and transparency interplay with AI racing

Jack Clark · Import AI · Aug 10, 2026

IFP think tank proposes 23 policy recommendations to manage automated AI R&D risks

“Right now, it’s as if the world is driving AI development in a car that only has an accelerator pedal and no brake pedal, let alone any kind of sophisticated telemetry for knowing things ranging from the speed of the car to the properties of the engine to the wear on the tires.”
You're Underestimating America

No Priors · Aug 02, 2026

US AI supply chain faces extreme concentration risk beyond chips, especially in robotics components dominated by China

“Robotics is an incredibly promising industry and the supply chain is right now completely dominated by China.”
The Danger of Over-Regulating AI

No Priors · Aug 11, 2026

Over-regulating AI safety risks repeating nuclear energy's costly policy mistakes

“we had a safety lobby in the 70s basically kill abundant clean energy for us”
Security Track Intro — Randall Degges, Snyk

AI Engineer · Jul 20, 2026

Snyk's Degges frames three AI adoption barriers: code security, agentic safety, and geopolitical model access.

“the biggest problem that I feel we have to still solve in our space is being able to use AI fearlessly”