From April 24 to 26, 2026, the annual Shanghai Forum 2026 was held at the Shanghai World Reception Hall. Themed “An Era of Reconstruction: Innovation and Shared Governance,” this year’s forum brought together nearly 400 guests from more than 50 countries and regions. During the forum, the Fudan think tank report Intelligent-Contract Ethics: Bridging the Gap Between Superintelligence and Future Humanity was officially released. The report is co-authored by the Center for Global AI Innovative Governance and the Institute of Technology Ethics for Human Future at Fudan University.
Cover (left) and table of contents (right) of the report Intelligent-Contract Ethics: Bridging the Gap Between Superintelligence and Future Humanity
On April 25, at the sub-forum “Building Inclusive and Equal Human-Machine Coupling: Risks and Collaborative Governance of Everyday Intelligent Communication in Cities,” Professor Yang Qingfeng, the report’s lead author and a researcher at the Center for Global AI Innovative Governance, delivered a keynote address on the newly released report. He noted that the 2026 report builds on the 2025 report Superintelligence: A Minority Report. The earlier report stressed that superintelligence is no longer a distant fancy but a real issue that must be taken seriously; the new report goes a step further, offering an ethical response to the risks of superintelligence.
The report argues that, as superintelligence moves from technological imagination toward reality, the traditional approach of treating AI risks as an identifiable, quantifiable “problem checklist” is losing its validity. In a superintelligence scenario, the core risks stem more from deep changes in the relational structure between humans and intelligent agents. Drawing on the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s “Spheres theory,” the report characterizes this kind of risk—one endogenous to the relationship of human-machine coexistence—as “spherical risk,” and on this basis puts forward its core proposition of “intelligent-contract ethics”: society should move from the social contract to the intelligent contract, establishing between humans and machines a contractual relationship that is negotiable, revisable, and open to sustainable adjustment.
The report holds that the significance of the intelligent contract lies in the fact that it can always be renegotiated by all parties on an equal footing. It is not a shackle binding the human-machine relationship, but a bridge connecting superintelligence with future humanity. Addressing the challenges of the human-machine relationship in the age of superintelligence, this report is also a new outcome of the Center for Global AI Innovative Governance’s ongoing exploration of frontier issues in AI governance.
