STOCKHOLM, May 14 (Xinhua) -- The Nordic and Baltic nations plan to extend their collaboration around the development of artificial intelligence (AI), the Swedish government announced on Monday.

Ministers from the Nordic and Baltic countries signed a common declaration on Monday to focus their collaborative efforts on promoting the use of AI in ways that better serve people. Sweden will lead the project.

"Our region is leading the way in Europe in the area of digitalization," said Sweden's housing and digital development minister Peter Eriksson in a statement published on the government website.

"Today's AI declaration involves an extended collaboration between the countries and now we, in Sweden, also take it upon ourselves to lead the Nordic-Baltic collaboration into the next phase by pushing the work forward and proposing necessary measures," Eriksson said.

Those measures include strengthening access to data to ensure that AI can be used by, and provide better service to, residents in Nordic and Baltic countries. There are also plans to develop "ethical and transparent" guidelines, standards, norms and principles for when and how AI programs ought to be used.

The ministers have also vowed to develop international standards for infrastructure, hardware, programs and data in order to secure operational compatibility, integrity, security, usability and mobility.

The Nordic and Baltic countries are Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.