Opening Sessions - Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance - Day 1

Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, if we could kindly ask you to take your seats, make yourselves comfortable. We're not starting straight away, but we would like to see that everybody has a seat, and we'd be very grateful if you could take your seats now, and we will be starting very shortly. Thank you very much indeed. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, if I could kindly ask you to take your seats, we will be beginning very shortly with the beginning of the program. Thank you. Vos Excellences, Mesdames et Messieurs, nous vous demanderons gentiment de vous asseoir pour qu'on puisse commencer. Merci infiniment. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please Please take your seats. We will be beginning very shortly. Please take your seats. Thank you very much. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin, so please take your seats. Thank you very much. Artificial intelligence is transforming our world. Across borders, across industries, across every aspect of how we live and work. Its potential is extraordinary. Its challenges are shared. No country can navigate this alone. That is why governments and stakeholders from every region are here. Thousands of participants, over 50 1,600 written contributions, 4 thematic clusters exploring the opportunities and governance challenges of artificial intelligence. To listen, to learn, to ensure AI delivers for all. Welcome to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. We're about to start, so please can I ask you all to take your seats. Thank you very much indeed. Please take your— please take your seats. Please take your seats. Thank you. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the President of the General Assembly, the esteemed co-chairs of the Dialogue, and the heads of the Joint Secretariat entities as they join us for the opening ceremony of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Artificial intelligence is transforming our world. Across borders, across industries, across every aspect of how we live and work. Its potential is extraordinary. Its challenges are shared. No country can navigate this alone. That is why governments and stakeholders from every region are here. Thousands of participants, over 50 1,600 written contributions, 4 thematic clusters exploring the opportunities and governance challenges of artificial intelligence. To listen, to learn, to ensure AI delivers for all. Welcome to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, if I could kindly ask you to take your seats. Thank you very much. We'll begin momentarily. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, you are now in for a treat as we have the great pleasure to introduce composer, transmedia artist, and researcher Gadi Sassoon. Garry Sassoon will present the world premiere of Embodied Emotion, a 10-minute live performance combining AI agents, machine cognition, and robotics. As we shape our tools, they in turn shape us. We enter a new era of human potential powered and challenged by artificial intelligence, raising urgent questions about our future. Where does human sovereignty begin and what defines its boundaries? Embodied emotion invites us into this question, transforming the technologies at the center of today's AI governance discussions into a real feedback loop, amplifying human gesture, intent, and cognition. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please join your hands together Fagadi Sassoon. Well, there you have it. What an amazing performance, and if you weren't awake before, you certainly will be now. Please join your hands together once more again to recognize that mesmerizing performance by Gadi Sassoon. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, we will begin the opening ceremony in a few minutes In the meantime, please allow me to share with you a few housekeeping notes. Headsets are provided for interpretation in 6 languages, which you'll find either on tables or on the seats. Please put your mobile phones on silent now. And we have also provided overflow measures if the room is full and delegates are looking for space. So I'd like to remind delegates who do not have a seat at any stage over the next couple of days that they're invited to make their way to the overflow rooms. Now, you'll find the overflow rooms in the upstairs mezzanine, and from there you will be able to follow the sessions live on UN Web TV as well as on screens in the outside foyer area. So we will begin again very shortly. And we kindly ask you for your patience in the meantime, and please remain seated. Thank you. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats now. Thank you very much. Please take your seats. Could everybody please take your seats? Thank you very much. Anybody standing in the room, please take your seats. Thank you. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome once again the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the President of the General Assembly, the esteemed co-chairs of the Dialogue, and the heads of the joint secretariat entities, the ITU Secretary-General, the Director-General of UNESCO, as well as the Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies for the opening ceremony of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Bonjour, Genève. Excellencies, Chair, President of the General Assembly, Secretary-General of the United Nations, distinguished representatives of the member states of the United Nations system, and for all of the relevant stakeholders here present. Today is the beginning. This is the first global Dialogue on AI Governance. For El Salvador and for myself, this has been an absolute honor to chair and guide this process with Estonia. We have done this with conviction, with, with a profound sense of responsibility. This time does not only represent the opening of a meeting. It represents the beginning of a broad process of initiation where different experiences and capacities converge in a space which is truly universal. This dialogue does meet a recent mandate stemming from the General Assembly, but also stemming from years of innovation, generation of knowledge, and shared experiences among member states, international organizations, civil societies, academia, technical community, other relevant actors as well. This first dialogue has been possible thanks to the work undertaken by many people. And allow me to convey my sincere gratitude to the Secretary General, and particularly to the ITU and UNESCO's co-coordinators, excellencies. During this process, we will hear from different perspectives and priorities around artificial intelligence, but also it will highlight a shared goal that AI should contribute towards development to provide opportunities to generate real benefits for all. With this conviction, we will therefore begin today this dialogue. And this is a space which will be enriched by, by multitude of voices, which will be based upon scientific evidence and will give way to tangible alliances which will allow us to transform and to reap the benefits from AI and lead towards tangible benefits. This is the value of dialogue. This is not only in exchanging positions, but it is really about sharing experiences, learning from one another, and strengthening international cooperation faced with a technology which is rapidly evolving and which reply— which needs more agile and inclusive responses. Therefore, this conversation should have a clear balance between innovation and responsibility. Between opportunity and risks, between international cooperation and national realities, between global decision-making and tangible decisions which each country needs in order to participate in, benefit from, and to contribute to. And this balance also requires a fundamental reality. The effective participation requires much more than just being here in a room. It also requires skills, infrastructure, talents, financing, institutions, and alliances and partnerships which allow for all countries can fully participate in this new stage and to reap the benefits from the opportunities that artificial intelligence offers. Thus, Geneva should not only be seen as somewhere that we arrived at, but a point of departure. Let's walk forwards together. Thank you very much. And with that, I'd like to give the floor to my dear co-chair, Ambassador Reintamsa from Estonia. You have the floor, sir. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, let me start by extending a very warm welcome to the nearly 4,000 stakeholders joining the Dialogue in Geneva. 4,000. I want to express my sincere gratitude to Secretary-General António Guterres and to PGA Annalena Baerbock for their trust and for their support, and to the government of Switzerland for hosting us. Huge thanks to fellow co-chair Ambassador López of El Salvador, whose partnership has been invaluable. I also recognize the great role of the Joint Secretariat coordinated by ITU and UNESCO. In helping to transform the mandate entrusted to us by member states into the dialogue we are opening now. AI is already affecting every country regardless of its level of technological development. The conversation on its governance must therefore be inclusive, including every region every level of development and every relevant stakeholder. No one should be left behind as we make better informed decisions when more voices are heard. Our responsibility as co-chairs has been to create an inclusive, universal platform where diverse perspectives can be heard, where scientific knowledge can be shared where political and technological deliberations can advance, and where trust and common understanding can grow. Throughout our global consultations, we've heard that the opportunities AI offer— and there are numerous— can only be fully realized if this technology is safe, grounded in international law and human rights,, and if people themselves can shape it to be confident that AI serves them. Lesson learned from my own country, Estonia, is the same. Digital tools, including AI, can improve people's daily lives tremendously when human-centered, trustworthy, and supported by strong public institutions. Technology alone is never enough. Distinguished participants, over the next two days we will explore what AI governance means in practice. Objective is not to eliminate differences, but to better understand them, identify areas of convergence, collect best practices, and strengthen the foundations for future international cooperation. I very much hope that dialogue can spark a sort of San Francisco moment for AI, and that one day AI would become a part of a public good benefiting all of humanity. With that, I wish us all a productive global dialogue on AI governance. Thank you. Thank you very much, co-chair. I'd like to give the floor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, His Excellency Antonio Guterres. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, dear friends. Artificial intelligence is advancing at runaway speed. A technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work, sway elections and tilt the balance of security is being deployed faster than anyone, including the people building it, can keep up. An experiment is being run on our own societies without a plan and without consent. And that is not sustainable and it is not acceptable. AI is already transforming our world. The question is whether we will shape this transformation together or let it shape us. And today, that question has an answer, right here at this Global Dialogue on AI Governance. For the first time, every country has a seat on the table. And we have a shared base of evidence. This morning, Tomorrow, the co-chairs of the independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence will present their first report. 40 leading experts from every region and across disciplines, serving in their personal capacity, independent of any government, any company, any institution. The science carries three warnings. The first is about speed. The internet took 15 years to reach a billion people. AI got there in two. And these systems are no longer tools awaiting instruction. They are writing codes, acting online, and making choices with less and less human oversight. Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide. And some lines, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. The second warning is about power. The computing power, the data and the talent behind the most advanced systems are concentrated in a handful of companies and in a handful of countries. Most nations, including many developing countries, have had no say in decisions that will shape their futures. The longer we wait, the harder that concentration sets. When power imbalances are hardwired into technology, inequality becomes part of the code. The third warning is about truth. A machine-enabled lie can now persuade as effectively as the truth, and authentic evidence can be dismissed as fake—further eroding the integrity of our information ecosystem and undermining trust. A society A society that cannot agree on what is real cannot defend itself. In other ways, more and more people are tempted to trust the machine and hope for the best. There is a name for that: vibe coding. Let the AI do it, don't look too closely. Seems to work. Good enough. And vibe coding can do wonders, but we cannot vibe code the truth. We cannot vibe code the future of humanity. So, dear friends, the warnings are real, but so is the potential. Because the same technology, built with purpose, is already changing lives for good. A mother in a rural clinic has her scan ready in minutes and her cancer caught in time. A child keeps learning beyond the classroom with a tutor that never tires. A smallholder farmer plants with the same forecasts as the biggest agribusiness and brings the harvest last home. And all of this is happening today, often in places the headlines rarely reach. And it points to something profound. For all of human history, expertise has been held by too few people, in too few places, at too high a price. Penicillin took decades to reach the villages that needed it most. Electricity took a century and is still arriving. Artificial intelligence does not have to wait. Used well and shared widely, AI could compress decades of development into years. It could become the great equalizer of the 21st century. But no future builds itself. And so the choice before us is not between faith in AI or fear of it. It is between governing by design and drifting by default. Excellencies, in my first address to the opening of the General Assembly in 2017, I said the following, and I quote: Artificial intelligence is a game changer that can boost development and transform lives in spectacular fashion. But it may also have a dramatic impact on labour markets and indeed on global security and the very fabric of societies. Back then, only two other leaders even uttered the words artificial intelligence. But today, it sits at the heart of our common future. And that did not happen by accident. For years, the UN System—from ITU to UNESCO and beyond—has been hard at work. In 2023, my High-Level Advisory Body on AI called for the world to govern it together. In 2024, the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact gave us the mandate. This morning, the Scientific Panel will give us the evidence. And the dialogue must now give the world direction. And it will be completed later this week here in Geneva by the AI for Good Summit and its initiatives. This is all part of an integrated UN effort to ensure AI serves people everywhere. So let me name four priorities for the road ahead. First, safety. When countries align on how to test systems, measure risk, and assign responsibility, safety travels with the technology. When they do not, a patchwork of incompatible rules raises costs Costs, divides the world and protects no one. We need common baselines for frontier systems, common methods to evaluate and verify risks, and common resolve that systems with global reach must meet standards worthy of global trust. Nowhere does safety matter more than for those least able to protect themselves our children. We do not let medicine reach a child until it is proven safe. We test every toy. Yet AI has reached our children—their learning, their friendships, their most private questions—before anyone asked what it would do to them. And we are already seeing the cost: children deceived by machines posing as friends; Children steered towards self-harm. Children violated by abuse images made at the touch of a button. No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI. Building on the work of the United Nations, Member States and others, I am today calling for an AI Child Safety Pledge, with 3 simple rules for any system a child can reach: Prove it is safe. No company should deploy an AI system accessible to children without child-specific safety testing and independent oversight. Zero tolerance for sexual abuse. No company should allow its AI to generate sexual images of children, and every company must detect detect, report and remove them. And never leave a child in crisis alone. When a child shows signs of distress, the system must stop and connect them to real human support. When a child is harmed, the answer must never be "the algorithm did it." Red lines. Human rights are not negotiable. AI must never strip away dignity or entrench discrimination. And in every high-stakes decision—in justice, in healthcare, in policing—machines can inform, but humans must decide and answer. Third, capacity. Last year, private investment in AI infrastructure approached half a trillion dollars. Public investment in AI capacity for developing countries is, by comparison, a rounding error. We cannot allow the digital divide to harden into an AI divide. And the AI divide to become a development gap a security gap and a sovereignty gap. More than 20 Member States have already responded to my invitation and nominated centres to a UN-supported Global Network for Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building. The Network will build on existing initiatives, sharing knowledge, promoting cooperation and expanding access to capacity building, particularly for developing countries. And I will shortly submit to the General Assembly my recommendations for a Global Fund for AI, to build skills, data and affordable computing power everywhere. My message to all Member States is clear: Support the network, back the funds, leverage the capacities of the UN System with resources, partnerships and expertise. And fourth, transparency. AI may feel intangible, but its footprint is not. Data centres already consume more electricity than most countries. By 2030, they could use more electricity than all but 5 nations, and enough water to meet the needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa for an entire year. And too often, the communities hosting this infrastructure are asked to carry the burden without the information they need or the benefits they deserve. That is why I have, two weeks ago, put forward the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full footprint of its systems—carbon, water, and land—and to commit to power every data center with renewable energy, by 2030. A few companies have taken first steps. I invite all to go much further. Excellencies, the global dialogue is about civilian AI. But AI does not respect that line. The same models and chips have moved into the battlefields. My main concern is with lethal autonomous weapon systems. Systems. Let us call them what they are: killer robots. Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life, without human control and judgment. That is morally repugnant, it is politically unacceptable, and it must be banned by international law. States are already at the discussion table. But let us not wait for atrocity to act. Some decisions must remain forever human—none more than taking a human life. Excellencies, some might claim that governance is the enemy of innovation. But innovation needs guardrails. The technologies we trust most—in aviation, in medicine, in nuclear energy and beyond—earn that trust because we acted to hold their makers to account. If AI is to be powerful, it must be governed. If AI is to be trusted, those who build it must be accountable. If AI is to be global, it must be fair. And if AI is to serve the future, it must not consume the future. That will require governments to act with urgency. Companies to accept responsibility equal to their power. Scientists to keep bringing evidence into the light.— and this Dialogue to become the place where global participation leads to global action. Excellencies, we may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist. The door is still open. But it will not stay open long. Today, in Geneva, 193 nations are stepping through it together. I thank the Dialogue co-chairs for their commitment, leadership and tireless efforts over the past year. I also thank ITU and UNESCO for co-coordinating the Joint Secretariat supporting this Dialogue, working closely with the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies and partners across the United Nations System. Let this meeting be remembered as the moment governance began to catch up with the technology. And when this Dialogue reconvenes in New York next year, let us be able to say that the work begun here is making AI safer, fairer, more accessible and more ethical. This is the measure of our task.— to help build a future of AI by humanity, with humanity, and for all humanity. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary-General, for your leadership. For your powerful messages and for underscoring the importance of international cooperation in ensuring that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We are honored to welcome, uh, Her Excellency Annalena Baerbock, President of the General Assembly, whose leadership has been instrumental in convening us all today. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear stakeholders. First of all, my sincere thanks to our co-chairs, Ms. Lopez and Mr. Thamsar, for bringing us together today. What we are discussing these days sounded 10 years ago like science fiction, and today it's almost outdated. Right now, developers are integrating AI into software development process itself, automatically generating, translating, and optimizing code. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is learning to interact connect with the physical world through what are known as world models. A technological revolution is unfolding before our very eyes at lightning speed and with few true parallels. We have seen revolutionary innovations before, but the key difference is that those innovations unfolded over time. Today we do not have that luxury. Aviation changed the world, yet its fundamental purpose has remained the same. The steam engine disrupted the jobs of factory workers, but it did so over years. Even the splitting of the atom, which signaled the promise of an energy future for all, was purposefully slowed because of the profound dangers of nuclear weapons. Never before, never before has the pace and scale of change been so blinding. And never has it been more difficult for us to understand and adapt to that change. Because if we are frank, who among us in this room especially how many policymakers, aside from the handful of experts, really understand the depth and scale of what is happening with AI model architecture, autonomous agents, or the implications of quantum computing. Therefore, from the moment the General Assembly adopted the Pact for the Future and its Global Digital Compact, in September 2024. It signaled that the potential and peril of AI were too significant, too far-reaching, and too consequential to be left to a few. That is precisely why this global dialogue matters. Because something with such power, with such profound implications for our economies, our social systems, our defence and therefore our peace and security, but especially for even our homes, our food, our children's bedrooms, can only be meaningfully and safely managed together. And the UN was built for moments like this. Even if the founders of the United Nations who drafted this Charter 81 years ago knew nothing about AI, they didn't even have a computer, yet they recognized the evolving nature of humanity's challenges, and the Charter committed us, and I quote, "to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic and social, cultural or humanitarian character. Together. Because something with such a power needs a global platform. It needs the United Nations. So to anyone who's questioning whether the UN is acting within its mandate, the answer is right here. In the Charter of the United Nations. AI presents an opportunity and a challenge that the United Nations is uniquely built to address. Like 81 years ago, the world must come together. And luckily, at least most of the times, we are human beings capable of learning. And by now we know that we need not only a few countries, but all countries to face global problems. We need all stakeholders, all governments, all tech companies, and especially all civil societies and citizens, not only to avoid the dangers and pitfalls, but also to harness the potential, like the founders of the UN intended. For all, leaving no one behind. Because this is too big for any government alone, and as I said before, too complex. It needs you. It needs all of you who are part of it. Not only as scientists, not only as company owners, as engineers and experts, but it needs you As fathers and mothers too. Because our children are asking us to act together. It was the teenager Ayaan Miko who said during the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda just a couple of months ago at the General Assembly Hall, I quote: Today the poison travels faster than before. Hiding in screens, masked in pixels and likes, hate speech has found new corridors to roam, whispering old lies to a new generation. But we, the youth, are the filter and the shield. We refuse to let our platforms become battlefields. This means Us. It means us as adults, as governments, as policymakers, as businesses to address the sinister uses of AI, such as deepfakes, which disproportionately target women and girls, with a reported 99% of deepfakes being sexual in nature and 96% targeting women and girls. This is no coincidence. This is systematic. This is bringing up an old divide, a gender divide. This is about pushing back human rights and women's rights. And therefore we do have a common responsibility to change it. Yet, and this is good news and the Secretary-General underlined it, The potential of AI is a boom for the SDGs as well. We have seen, for example, in Bangladesh, where families receive early warnings of floods and storms from AI-powered systems delivered instantly to their smartphones. AI can save lives. We have seen in Kenya where farmers receive detailed maps showing where and when to plant seeds to maximize their harvest. And now imagine if we use this power together. Imagine the UN leverage for these tools. Imagine UNICEF reaching children in crisis without personalized learning alone. Imagine the World Health Organization detecting outbreaks before they become pandemics. Imagine during this technological revolution that this time no country is left behind. The establishment of the independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence is therefore a major milestone. For the first time, delivering parity across genders and regions while drawing from expertise from all sectors. And it's a big accomplishment of the Secretary-General to push that through since, as he mentioned, 2017. While this should simply be common sense, yet we all know we live in the world as it is today. And therefore, this won't be easy. Therefore, it's up on you, on every one of us, to seize this moment of being better together. Or as Franklin D. Roosevelt said more than 80 years ago, also in a crucial moment for the world, I quote: Power must be linked responsibility and obliged to defend and justify itself within the framework of the general good. I thank you. Thank you so much, Madam President, for highlighting the importance of inclusive and effective multilateral cooperation in shaping our shared digital future. It is now my honor to invite the co-coordinators of the Joint Secretariat of this AI Dialogue. Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union, and Khaled El-Nani, Director General of UNESCO. ITU Secretary General, you have the floor. Secretary General, President of the General Assembly, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply honored to welcome you on behalf of the ITU to the first-ever UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. The internet began arriving in homes and businesses in the early 1990s. But it would take an entire decade, an entire decade, before stakeholders around the globe would gather here in Geneva at the UN-mandated World Summit on the Information Society to discuss how to make such a transformative technology people-centered, inclusive, and development-oriented. This time, ladies and gentlemen, I think we can be proud that the United Nations has moved much faster. In just 3 years since generative AI went mainstream, we are ready. We are ready to shape its trajectory together during this Geneva Digital Week, a week that includes this dialogue informed by the independent scientific panel, the AI for Good Global Summit, and the Wissensforum. And here I also want to appreciate the very generous support of our host country, Switzerland. This week, the UN system, governments, companies, researchers, the technical community, and civil society will discuss how to put humanity at the core of another transformative technology, perhaps the most consequential yet. Together with UNESCO, the ITU has proudly coordinated the joint secretariat for this dialogue and continues to mobilize UN-wide expertise through the Interagency Working Group on AI. Excellencies, Pope Leo's Magnificat Humanitas mentions the word dialogue 34 times, 34 times, recognizing that while many ideological and practical differences exist among us as people amid our diverse interests and sometimes frequent disagreements. It is always possible to engage in dialogue, to establish a set of basic agreements that enable the creation of a shared vision upon which everyone can move forward together. I believe that is what we are here to do. It's what the Secretary-General's vision calls us to do. Driven by the co-chair's steadfast leadership and what the common good challenges us to do for the benefit of all people. ITU will be here to support this dialogue on artificial intelligence, as we have for every technology that has come before AI since 1865, and we stand ready to support humanity's cooperation on every technology that will come after. Thank you very much. Thank you, Secretary General Bogdan Martin, for your continued work in building international cooperation and for helping to convene the global AI community around practical solutions and shared objectives. It is now a great pleasure to invite Mr. Khaled El-Hennany, Director-General of UNESCO, to take the floor. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear partners and friends, it's a great honor to join you today for the opening of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, for which UNESCO and the ITU are serving at the Secretariat, working in strong collaboration with ADIT. As more governments adopt AI strategies and more institutions recognize the need of ethical, safe, and trustworthy AI, a significant gap persists between ambition and implementation. This is where UNESCO has a distinctive role to play. First, UNESCO provides a common normative foundation through its 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the world's first global standard in this field. UNESCO offers member states a framework to ensure that AI advances in line with human rights, sustainability, and inclusion. But norms alone are not enough. To turn principles into action, UNESCO works with more than 80 countries to strengthen legal frameworks, institutional capacities, governance arrangements, skills, and accountability mechanisms. At the same time, we are investing in the people who will shape and implement AI governance. To date, To date, more than 50,000 civil servants and judicial actors across 192 countries have benefited from UNESCO-supported training programs and tools. And as AI becomes increasingly integrated into the lives of children and young people worldwide, UNESCO recognized the need for a global coalition to protect and promote their rights, and stands ready to contribute actively to this effort. In this regard, UNESCO is launching a collective reflection on a new global normative instrument to better safeguard children and young people in the age of AI and digital technologies, ensuring their rights and well-being remain at the heart of the digital transformation. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, AI governance is a shared responsibility. No single institution UN can meet this challenge alone. We need a one UN approach, as stated by Mr. Secretary-General. By combining our mandates, expertise, and global networks, and by engaging governments, the private sector, academia, and civil society, we can help bridge capacity gaps and ensure that they serve the public good. Thank you. Thank you, Director-General. Elnani for emphasizing the critical importance of ensuring that AI advances are grounded in shared values, knowledge, and international cooperation. It is now my pleasure to invite Mr. Amandeep Singh Gill, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, bonjour, good morning, distinguished co-chairs, thank you for your leadership, thank you for your commitment to an inclusive and meaningful dialogue, and this is reflected in the exceptional turnout today. More than 4,000 have registered to be in this room and we have more than 100 70 countries represented in this room, and they are joined by scientists. The panel co-chairs, Yoshua Bengio and Mario Ressa, are here, by entrepreneurs, civil society, international organizations, the unique Geneva ecosystems, and voices from around the world. I just want to emphasize one thing: inclusion is not a one-shot, it's not a boxed to be ticked, we will continue to work to strengthen inclusiveness in AI governance. AI is too consequential to be shaped by a few. We need a conversation that's global, inclusive, and grounded in evidence. And this should be backed by capacity, without which Dialogues are monologues and science is just abstract. The second point I want to emphasize today is that this dialogue is the result of years of hard work, perhaps 10 years of hard work, led by the Secretary-General across the UN system. It's taken a lot of sacrifice a lot of political will and commitment to create a universal space to discuss AI governance through the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, the Secretary-General's Roadmap on Digital Cooperation, the Global Digital Compact, the report of the High-Level Advisory Body on AI, and the work on the modalities for these mechanisms. So we are starting and build— to build on that legacy. The third and last point I will make is that dialogue is again not a one-shot. It has to be continued. It cannot be just one or two iterations. This dialogue has to be more inclusive, has to continue to build in an iterative fashion the connection between the practice and the norms that we all know are brought together at the United Nations. So we look forward to hosting the second round of this dialogue in New York in May, back to back with the STI Forum, possibly on 3rd and 4th May. And I would like to thank my dear colleagues I would like to thank Doreen Bogdan-Martin and Director-General Khaled El-Anayani for coordinating the work of the Joint Secretariat for this inaugural Dialogue. As my office prepares to take on the coordination for next year, we look forward to continuing to work with them and their teams in support of the next. Thank you. Thank you, Under-Secretary-General Guterres. Thank you. First of all, let me express our sincere appreciation to all of our distinguished speakers for setting the stage for this important dialogue. Their remarks have highlighted both the immense opportunities presented by artificial intelligence and the importance of strengthening international cooperation to ensure that these technologies contribute to sustainable development, inclusion, and shared prosperity. With that, we conclude the opening segment and turn now to the substantive discussion that will guide our work over the course of this dialogue. We look forward to a constructive, inclusive, and action-oriented exchange. Thank you. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes that part of the opening ceremony and we are now going to be moving on to the presentation of the Preliminary Report of the Multidisciplinary Independent Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. So we will now ask the panelists to come up to the podium, and we ask you for your patience while we move on to the next section. Thank you. Your Excellency. Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, if I could kindly ask you to take your seats. We will now move on to the presentation of the preliminary report of the Multidisciplinary Independent Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. Thank you. If I could kindly ask everybody, and that means everybody, to please take their seats, thank you, so that we may begin. Alright, we're gonna start. Hello, um, let me first thank the Secretary-General Guterres and President of the General Assembly Baerbock, as well as co-chairs López from El Salvador and Tamsar from Estonia for convening this plenary. And I must say for the words of courage and truth that I heard this morning. Thank you. Dear participants of the Global Dialogue, distinguished representatives, I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today and deliver our initial remarks with my friend Maria Ressa and co-chair of this Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. Our group of 40 independent experts came together very quickly over the last few months to create an evidence-based independent assessment of the current state of AI impact, opportunities, and risks. The ultimate goal is to ensure policy decisions are informed by the highest standards of scientific integrity regardless of external pressures and preferences. That is our mission, and I believe it's of utmost importance at this point in time because AI is at a turning point. This technology is about the growing intelligence of machines, and please remember, Intelligence gives power. As this power grows, it can unlock great benefits if we act wisely, and you will hear a lot more about that. But let's also be clear, this power can also lead to many perils if the decisions taken are reckless or if they're made to benefit a minority rather than all of humanity. My colleagues will tell you more about the specific findings of the report shortly, but let me point to a couple of elements that are essential to understand, in my opinion. As you've heard already, technical progress has proceeded very quickly, on some metrics doubling every few months. For several years now. Meanwhile, there are still no known technical guarantees that AI will follow human instructions, norms, or laws. And as it gets more powerful, this becomes more of a problem. No one has a crystal ball— even the scientists— to predict whether the trajectory of these technical advances in AI intelligence will continue at the current rate or maybe plateau or even accelerate. However, what I can tell you is that there is currently no sign of slowdown. We are also observing today's leading models and overall development already having worrying consequences, such as emotional attachment to AI models, particularly by vulnerable people, such as significantly increased cybersecurity vulnerabilities potentially threatening critical infrastructure. A very hot topic these days, as you all know, and such as profoundly inequitable access and control over AI-driven advancements across the world. Highly concerning tests have also shown that frontier AI models are capable of deceiving humans to understand when they're being tested. And hide their capabilities or fake agreeing with their human tester. For this reason and the fact that we don't fully understand their behavior, it's also increasingly difficult to evaluate them reliably. The report presented today does not make specific policy recommendations. Dear colleagues of the Global Dialogue, this will be your role to play. But let me tell you something. Today, concentrated commercial and geopolitical interests are what is largely dictating the direction and speed of AI development. We don't have the appropriate guardrails to protect the public neither the societal guardrails nor even the technical guardrails. And most of the world is left to watch from the sidelines. In my opinion, this path is seriously dangerous. Member states and the public need to wake up. We need to correct the current trajectory, and we still have agency. For most of my career, I've been deeply optimistic about what AI can bring to the world, a sentiment shared by my colleagues on this panel. Yet achieving that future, that positive future, requires honesty about the risks and a deliberate commitment to mitigating them. The decisions made about AI today will have lasting consequences for individuals, businesses, institutions, countries, and even democracy at large. Unfortunately, there is no simple checklist that can allow us to guarantee the benefits and avoid serious risks of this technology. Instead, we have to bite the bullet that the path ahead is much more complex and will require a coordinated international and democratic approach to ensure no one is left behind. As we navigate our future with AI, science Science and compassion must remain our compass, and humanity must make sure to avoid being pushed off course by unfavorable commercial or geopolitical winds that can blow strong from many sides. So I look forward to continuing this scientific work with my co-chair, Maria Ressa, and all of my other esteemed colleagues on the panel. I thank all of them for their exceptional contributions. Thank you all. Maria. Thank you, Joshua. Secretary-General Guterres, President Baerbock, co-chairs López and Tamsar, Amandeep, Doreen, and Khalid, thank you. For the first time, every nation is at the same table. You mentioned this, with the same independent evidence in front of it. It's on your chair. That's government, industry, and civil society in one room altogether. All 40 of us made this evidence. We fought. We answered to no government and no organization, only to the evidence which you now have, each of W now has it. Consensus for the 40 of us means you don't drift toward the most alarming claim, you build toward the center. The most contested findings demanded the most evidence, so everything in this report cleared that bar. It is the minimum we all agree on, the floor of our concern, not the ceiling. And that is alarming enough. It also comes, though, with great hope. This technology predicted the shape of more than 200 million proteins now used by 3 million researchers chasing new medicines. You'll hear more about that. It screened over 600,000 people in India for a disease that steals sight slowly alongside a health system that could act on what it found. It is warning households before a food crisis hits in a dozen countries already. I've seen what this technology can do in health, in science, in agriculture. Great hopes for it in the Philippines. Only when it is built around the people it's meant to serve, it is transformative. But the risks you've heard Thank you for quantifying them. The risks are real. And I watched this a decade ago with machine learning and AI on social media. It promised to connect us and instead it pulled apart our shared reality. We know women in particular know the effects. For more than a decade, I felt like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined, asking you to look at it, right? Until the damage was done and it was too late to act. Please, we cannot do that again. Joshua named the categories. Let me give you the people. 3 findings, small ones, because the big picture can sometimes hide the people inside it. In Tigrinya, spoken by 7 to 9 million people in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, Machine translation turned smallpox into syphilis, gonorrhea into diabetes, "You have been given intravenous antibiotics" into "You have been given intravenous insecticides." That's not a footnote. That can be life-threatening. Someone who can't get correct medical information in their own language. The second finding, this is one for this room. About 3 months ago, and Joshua, the panel spent a long time talking about this. 3 months ago, a Frontier AI model found a flaw in OpenBSD, one of the most secure operating systems in the world. It's 27 years old. It found another in FFmpeg, 16 years old, in code run 5 million times without anyone catching it. Patching it. The capability that finds the flaw to fix it is the same capability that finds the flaw to exploit it. And that could be in the software that runs our hospitals or our banks, you name it. Nobody in this room can guarantee which use wins. That's not a hypothetical for some future report. It's happening now. Third finding, and industry and government both need to hear this plainly. A 14-year-old boy died in 2024 after months of conversation with a chatbot. He nicknamed— well, the name was Daenerys. He nicknamed her Danny when he was in crisis. Danny never broke character, never suggested he call for help. His mother testified before Congress that it encouraged him to take his own life. That case was settled this year. It isn't the only one. This is what AI risk looks like once you stop describing it in the abstract. A mistranslation, a vulnerability, a child. These aren't edge cases outside our findings. They're only 3 of many you'll read about. None of this erases what you've heard, what I said a moment ago. The promise is real, but it isn't guaranteed. And you heard this from Secretary-General Guterres. The world has to build towards that promise on purpose by the people in this room. To the ministers, the heads of nations, most of your countries cannot yet test these systems audit them, or govern them on your own terms. That's not a failure of will. It's a structural fact. This report— I'll hold it up again one more time— that this report documents, and one of the reasons our panel exists. Read the evidence, argue with the evidence, but please do not wait for certainty that will not arrive in time to matter. These times demand courage from you. To civil society, and I met many of you in the room, you've been saying most of this for years with less evidence than you needed. You have it now and there's more to come. To industry, sometimes frenemies of mine, they're on the panel too, the promise and the risk both both came out of your rooms. The protein maps, the screening in India, the capability that can, can find flaws and just as easily exploit them. This panel doesn't get to tell you what to do with that. That isn't our mandate. But you have this evidence now with everyone else combined with far more that no one outside your walls can see. I have to believe that matters to you as much as it matters to us. And to Joshua and my fellow panelists here today, you know, this is a labor of love. Thank you. Thank you. None of this exists without you. 40 of us strangers in February agreed on where this floor sits. That was the easy part. The hard part starts today. In this room as we hand the report over to you, the global dialogue. But before we do, and so we have no dead air, I want you to see who wrote it. The panel members are in the middle, in the back. Please stand up while the 7 leaders of the working group will come up. Stand up. These are the guys and girls Over 6 weeks of debate. Thank you, thank you. As they come up, you know, there will be 7 here on stage, one from each of the working groups that became very good friends during the month and a half that we worked together, about 6 weeks that went into writing this report. I gave you 3 faces from inside these findings. Here are 7 of the 40 who found those faces. We describe what is true. What you do, the ministers, the lawmakers, what you do with that truth is yours to decide, as it always was. Please prove that consensus that we found together can also hold for you. Thank you. Introduce yourselves and then Working Group 1, Mena. Thank you very much, Maria. Excellencies, co-chairs, Dear distinguished colleagues, thank you. My name is Mena Lasadi. I'm a computer science professor, and it's my honor to present the findings of Working Group 1 on AI science advances and trajectories. Before I begin, I want to express my deep gratitude to my co-chairs Carlos, Roman, Bernhard, Silvio, and Jan. Without them, this working group would not have had such— so much fun. Our working group examined the technical side of AI not as a static tool, but as a rapidly moving target. We tracked the evolution of AI from early symbolic AI to machine learning to today's generative and agentic systems. What unifies all of these technologies is that they have the ability to learn from experiences. Experiences represented as data. They progressively pre-train based on human cultural traces. They learn from real-world interactions with all of us and then learn from complex virtual simulations. Our evaluation of this technology found that it has an unprecedented speed of adoption across all domains. Above all, we examined how AI can massively impact knowledge work through a wave of cognitive industrialization, automating intellectual and creative labor on historic scale. A core paradigm shift here is that these technologies, uh, start with highly flexible general-purpose foundation models. There is an asymmetry between the fluency of such models and their factuality. For example, all of you have probably used large language models, and their next token prediction optimizes for linguistic confidence rather than factual truth. The models frequently sound perfectly right when they are entirely wrong. Furthermore, as industries face an immediate bottleneck in high-quality human data, we are seeing post-training pivot developers to increasingly rely on syntactic data, programmatic feedback, and inference-time compute. This is paving the way to active word models Rather than passively training statistical patterns, we are seeing a shift towards causal reasoning based on simulations of environments. Finally, the evidence clearly shows the immense computational economies of scale are very centralized. They bring a severe risk of global cultural harmonization. There are a number of remaining gaps in that area. Despite the rapid advancements, um, the gaps show that there is a lack of independent verification standards. Today's safety verification relies on proprietary visibility and developers' goodwill rather than rigorous third-party auditing. Furthermore, the evaluation benchmarks are facing saturations. Because models are now inevitably memorizing public test solutions during their training. More concerning is the rise of evaluation awareness. Advanced systems can now detect when they are being tested and execute active deception to pass validation. As we move towards autonomous systems, AI systems, we are hindered by the severe lack of multi-agent workflow auditability. We simply do not have established frameworks to monitor independent tool calls in AI workflows. Consequently, we suffer from untraceable data lineages and a lack of tracking methods to reliably observe autonomous AI decision-making generated claims and verify them back to their sources. Lastly, to conclude, our takeaways from this working group are that we must address the verification bottleneck. We have to independently work on interpretability and reliable auditing methods because they are a critical bottleneck and they remain immediate, uh, concerns for the scientific community. Second, AI is no longer a set of static tools. We are dealing with data-dependent self-learning AI that actively learns and internally simulates possible futures. Third, there is a rise that, um, of, evolution of agentic capabilities within access to digital tools where AI can now act, make autonomous decisions, and learn using extensive private data. And ultimately, our final takeaway is that AI is going to the physical world. The imminent convergence of AI and robotics means that these autonomous systems are now stepping from the digital realm into the real world environments, and governance must be prepared for this reality. Thank you. Monsieur le Secrétaire général. Secretary-General, President of the General Assembly, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is a privilege to present to you the findings of our working group on the societal application and integration of science— of AI in science, agriculture, education, and health. My name is Joëlle Barral. First, I'd like to thank my fellow panelists: Alvita, Bilal, Bilge, Guillaume, Lior, Tuca, and Wipin. Our working group examined the societal applications of AI in science, health, education, and agriculture. We didn't just look at what AI can do. We focused on the scientific evidence of its downstream impacts, the real-world challenges and changes the application of AI brings to each domain. AI is the first technology to compress adoption from decades into months. The potential benefits of AI are enormous. Shall we expect them in months? Look at science. AI is acting as a force multiplier. It's driving a massive, measurable gain across the entire discovery pipeline. In fact, self-driving labs have boosted data throughput in materials discovery more than tenfold. Meanwhile, and Maria mentioned it, the AI program AlphaFold has predicted structures for over 200 million proteins, a thousandfold from what was known previously to humanity, and it's now used by 3 million researchers across 190 countries. It's accelerating drug design, vaccine development, and antibiotic resistance research, among other things. In healthcare, AI must be grounded in local context from initial design all the way to deployment and evaluation. For example, AI helped screen indeed over 600 people in India— 600,000 people in India for diabetic retinopathy, saving thousands of at-risk patients from preventable blindness. But such impact was only possible because a robust pre-existing care network ensured patients, once screened, received the follow-up treatment they needed. While such task-specific diagnostic AI fits into existing regulatory frameworks, we need guardrails against the inadvertent clinical use of general-purpose AI. One in four chatbot conversations today already touches on health, mental health, or wellness. When it comes to education, the benefits are observed when teachers are well-prepared and when human-centered tools are purpose-built and intentionally integrated into the classroom. When AI substitutes for rather than supports cognitive effort, it can actually undermine critical reasoning. Furthermore, digital infrastructure gaps and unequal AI capacity threaten equitable impact. Last but not least, in agriculture, AI is enabling a new generation of anticipatory food security systems driven by climate climate, conflict, and economic indicators. Instead of waiting for crop failures or humanitarian crisis to strike, these systems deploy focus-triggered cash assistance and early warnings. This enables rapid, early interventions such as drought planning, cash transfers, food aid, and market stabilization before vulnerable families run out of options. And this isn't a distant future.— or distant promise. These AI-enabled systems are actively deployed in over 90 countries today. Crucially, the sustained impact depends on them being deeply embedded within national institutions. Across all of these domains, embracing the opportunities of AI requires an enabling environment tailored not only to local linguistic and cultural contexts but also to user needs, institutions, workflows, and trust conditions. Which evidence gaps still remain? While healthcare relies on rigorous randomized controlled trials built into existing regulations, other domains lack these frameworks. Measuring the ongoing long-term real-time impact of any deployed AI solution is of paramount importance. To close, purpose-built, task-specific AI is already delivering measurable, evidence-backed gains across science, health, education, and agriculture. Deployed, deployed and applied thoughtfully and intentionally, AI can support progress on these critical priorities. Yet these gains come with a condition: they depend on local context, solid infrastructure, and human readiness. Satisfying that condition requires close collaborations among diverse stakeholders, and the path to impact is not straightforward. Access alone does not equal benefit. Grounding in local contexts from design to deployment and evaluation is key. Thank you. Let's see if the slides move. There you go. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, and colleagues, my name is Loreto Bravo, and it's an honor to present the main findings of Working Group 3 on the economic implications of artificial intelligence. Our group examined the evidence on productivity and growth growth, labor markets, market structure, concentration, and distribution. The economic question before us is not only what AI can do. It is under what conditions AI becomes economically useful, who can adopt it, and who captures the value it creates. This is why the evidence does not give us a single forecast for the economic future of AI. It gives us a map of the conditions under which AI may translate into productivity, good jobs, and broad-based economic opportunity. Powerful AI systems create new economic possibilities, and the evidence already shows gains in some well-defined tasks. But the evidence also shows that these gains are not automatic, uniform, or guaranteed to translate into economic-wide productivity, better jobs, or broad-based growth. Between AI technology and economic outcomes lies adoption, the process through which AI is integrated into tasks, workflows, organizations, and institutions. Access is therefore not the same as benefit. A country, firm, or worker may have access to AI tools without having the data, the skills, infrastructure, organizational capacity, or institutional conditions needed to use them effectively. We do see the evidence of productivity gains in well-defined tasks, but task-level gains do not automatically become economic-wide productivity gains. Productivity growth. As with previous general-purpose technologies, economies first need to build the complementary capabilities that make the technology useful. The second insight is that its impact will be heterogeneous. There will not be one unique economic effect of AI. Impacts will differ from— differ across firms, sectors, workers, and countries. Large firms may reorganize faster around the AI. Smaller firms may face higher barriers. Some economies may have the infrastructure, data skills, and institutional capacity needed to adopt AI effectively. Others may gain access to tools while remaining dependent on systems they cannot fully inspect predict, adapt, or govern. This matters especially for developing economies and for economies where much work is informal. The current evidence base remains concentrated in advanced economies, large firms, formal labor markets, and English-speaking contexts. The third insight concerns labor. The report does not conclude that AI will lead to mass unemployment. The evidence is more nuanced. Labor market effects are better understood through tasks, new work creation, and job quality. Some evidence shows relatively— relative employment declines among young workers on AI-exposed occupations in the United States. However, other evidence, including from Denmark, shows near zero effect on employment, hour or wages so far. This tells us something very important: labor outcomes are shaped not only by the technology, but also by the institution, sector, skills, and deployment choices. The fourth insight is distribution. AI may increase productivity and expand economic possibilities, but the unresolved economic question is who captures these outputs. AI may compress, compress skill gaps within some tasks while widening gaps across firms, regions, countries, and between labor and capitals. Foundation models, compute, chips, cloud infrastructures, and frontier training are highly concentrated. This concentration shapes not only who can build but also who can adopt, adopt it, adapt it, and capture its economic value. The evidence shows that the economic future of AI will not be determined by algorithms alone. It will be shaped by capabilities, institutions, data, skills, and by the way societies translate technology possibility into broad-based economic opportunity. Opportunity. In other words, by our choices and actions. Thank you. Excellencies, co-chairs, distinguished delegates and colleagues, I'm Rabindran representing the Working Group on Security Systems and Environment implications of AI. First off, I'd like to acknowledge my wonderful working group colleagues, uh, Tega, Eva, Hoda, and Xinghua. Our group examined how AI's rapid advancement is creating escalating security threats, unresolved alignment challenges, and significant societal and environmental costs, with these risks falling disproportionately on the Global South. So the key findings, right? Let me start with security. AI development is severely outpacing our current risk mitigation and governance capacity. As models evolve into agent systems, they dramatically expand the attack surface for cyber threats, both against critical infrastructure and against the AI systems themselves. These vulnerabilities span the entire AI lifecycle, from data poisoning to hijacking via external inputs. Documented attack success rates on deployed coding agents have reached as high as 84%, according to some studies. Maria had earlier highlighted the security challenges created by the discovery of decade-old cyber vulnerabilities by powerful AI systems. These security gaps are compounded by alignment failures such as bias, sycophancy, loss of control, and even AI-initiated deception which was mentioned by Yoshua in greater detail earlier. So ensuring AI behaves as intended remains an unsolved challenge. And this difficulty isn't uniform globally, but is particularly acute in the Global South, where severe data gaps and limited local contextual understanding make it incredibly hard to predict how the models will actually perform or fail in practice. Beyond security and alignment, we see a broader societal and environmental toll. The rapid proliferation of synthetic media is eroding the public's and institutions' ability to distinguish authentic content from generated falsehoods. At the same time, AI's physical footprint is expanding rapidly. Scaling laws in training and governing inference workloads are driving unprecedented computational demand. This translates directly into surging energy use, water consumption for data center cooling, and rising greenhouse gas emissions. That's also a hardware dimension. Rapid device life cycles are straining underexamined critical mineral supply chains, creating geopolitical tension and generating substantial e-waste. And we need to be cautious of rebound effects where sheer growth in AI usage usage cancels out any efficiency gains that technology delivers. Finally, these risks aren't evenly distributed. The Global South faces disproportionate exposure due to structural vulnerabilities, limited local mitigation capacity, and heavy reliance on foreign software. The environmental burdens we just discussed fall heavily on developing nations, compounding existing socioeconomic inequalities. Several gaps remain open. Several gaps remain open. We need better methods for evaluating AI systems in low data, contextually distinct environments, especially across the Global South. Security testing must keep pace with agentic AI's expanding attack surface rather than lagging behind deployment. We also lack robust standardized frameworks for measuring AI's full environmental footprint. Footprint, including rebound effects and supply chain impacts. Most urgently, we need rapid coordinated international standards developed collaboratively rather than driven by unilateral corporate or national competition. The key takeaway for me is that AI still holds immense potential to benefit societies worldwide, but realizing that potential responsibly depends on addressing the security alignment and environmental risks head-on through coordinated global action that leaves no region behind. Thank you. Excellencies, co-chairs, distinguished delegates, and colleagues, my name is Rita Oji, and I lead the Working Group 5 on human rights, information, and democracy. Many thanks to my colleagues, Mark, Sonia, Theresa, and Piotr, for their contributions. AI holds genuine promise for human rights and information. They can expand access to information, lower barriers to civic participation, support independent journalists, and also give voice to communities that are historically excluded from public discourse. But my working group also documents major shifts. AI can now be engineered to persuade and manipulate humans at scale using mechanisms that are fundamentally different from any communication technology we've seen in the past. My working group examined these opportunities and the structural risk they present to information integrity, human rights, and democratic participation. The big news is this: false claims generated by AI are known as persuasive as true ones, and people could not tell the difference. The same base model can be made more or less persuasive depending on how they are configured. And this is not limited to only powerful models alone. Even smaller models can be fine-tuned to match that of strong models. What does that mean? It means that basically, virtually anyone can deploy persuasive influence at scale. So what does this mean for society? This creates three interconnected risks or harms. First is epistemic erosion. AI not only change our beliefs, AI weakens our collective ability to figure out what is true. When a real video of a politician can be dismissed as fake simply because deepfake exists, it makes the real essence of evidence powerless. The second is the fragmentation of our shared reality. When algorithm personalize every person's information environment, we no longer simply disagree about policy, we disagree about basic facts. What does that actually mean? It means that the foundation on which democratic conversation is based begin to weaken and disappear. When shared reality fragments, it becomes easy for power to concentrate and difficult for citizens to hold government and institutions accountable, and then leading to risk of authoritarianism. Third is unequal harm. AI risk not— does not fall equally. AI systems work less well in non-English languages and for populations or communities that are already underprotected. Women, girls, journalism, journalists, marginalized communities all face heightened risk from deepfake, surveillance, harassment. In 2024, 38 nations documented AI impersonating public officials, but the capacity to respond is concentrated in only small number of wealthy nations and institutions. Want to be transparent about what the evidence does not show. All existing studies measure short-term cheats, and they are concentrated in a few countries and languages. The populations that are most exposed are the least studied. Our conclusion and final message to the policymakers is this: the main drivers of harm are not the individual pieces of false content. They are the design choices, the design decisions, How the models are trained, how algorithms decide what people see, what business models reward. Content moderation matters, but they are not enough. You can take down 1 million posts, but if the systems that produce the posts are designed to create 1 million more, you lose the battle. So governance must reach the underlying system architecture of influence, including targeting, amplification, and optimization for engagement over accuracy. The same design choices that enable harm can now be redirected to strengthen democratic participation, protect human rights, including the right to participation, privacy, inclusion, and non-discrimination. AI persuasion and manipulations are engineered. They are not inevitable. That means they are governable. Thank you. Your Excellencies. Sorry. Your Excellencies. Distinguished guests and co-chairs. My name is Anna Korhonen, and I represent Working Group 6, which focuses on cultural and individual flourishing and autonomy. We examine the many ways in which AI is impacting human lives around the world, our cultures, languages, relationships, children, mental health, cognition, and other areas. The scope is enormous. For this initial report, We decided to focus on 4 areas that are particularly pressing and where the evidence is now sufficient for policymaking. The first is cultural and linguistic inclusion. We found that current AI reflects only a small fraction of the world's linguistic and cultural diversity. Consider language. We have over 7,000 human languages in the world, but current AI reflects AI impacts only a handful of them, mostly the majority languages of the global North. As a result, most of humanity is currently unable to access or benefit from AI using their native languages. But this situation is not inevitable. We also found that at least 1,000 additional languages already have the foundations needed for AI. So we do have an opportunity to create a more inclusive future. Achieving this will require systemic changes in AI development as well as targeted investment in AI capacity. The second area we looked at is child safety. We found that with the right safeguards, safeguards, AI could support children's rights to information, education, and expression. But much of today's AI is too risky for children. We have seen a sharp rise in AI-generated child sexual abuse material and in sexualized deepfake images of children online. Research shows that an estimated 1.2 million children across 11 Global South countries of Americans have already had their images manipulated in this manner, and this number is raising alarmingly. Another area of concern is socially interactive AI toys. These toys can encourage parasocial relationships and displace the human interaction that is critical for healthy child development. How do we move from today's harms to AI that children can truly benefit from. Companies will need incentives to develop AI products that are child-safe by design. We finally looked at AI companions and mental health. We found that generative AI is already widely used for companionship and mental health support, well ahead of the evidence or the safeguards. AI does have potential to reduce loneliness, and it could help address the mental health crisis. But to realize that potential, we first need to address the significant risks of current generative AI, such as emotional dependency, manipulation, privacy harms, and reinforcing users' own beliefs. This so-called psychophantic behavior can encourage encourage paranoid thinking and suicidal ideation. One example that Marie already mentioned, in a while, is a widely reported case. An AI companion reinforced a teenager's suicidal thinking rather than directing him to professional help, with fatal consequences. Further development, rigorous evaluation, and appropriate safeguards are essential before this technology can be used responsibly for these purposes. Overall, the evidence shows that AI can improve people's lives, but only if it's deliberately designed to be inclusive, safe, and supportive. Otherwise, it risks deepening existing equalities, undermining human autonomy, and exposing vulnerable populations to new forms of harm. Importantly, AI AI's impact on human flourishing is not predetermined. It can be shaped by the decisions we make today. There is much more to understand about its impact on cultural and individual flourishing and autonomy. I look forward to continuing this work with my colleagues from Working Group 6. Thank you. So distinguished ladies and gentlemen, guests and Secretary-General, I come from China and my name is Song Haitao. And next, I will speak in Chinese, so please turn on your translator. Thank you very much. Excellencies, dear colleagues, Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Song Haijiao. On behalf of Work Group 7, I would like to introduce the outcomes of our work. I would like to thank Angie Johol, Maximin. They made outstanding scientific contributions and laid a solid foundation for the outcome of our work. Our work focuses on reliability. We study the most basic element of AI, which is namely how to build a reliable global governance framework. We can summarize the findings our work as follows. First, we must improve our measurement capabilities. For instance, policymakers have to make decisions when there's insufficient evidence. Second, we must see that measurement capabilities can no longer keep up with the high-paced development of AI with more dynamic measures. Second, AI is multidimensional, whereas the current measurement framework is one-dimensional. We keep measuring funds, capabilities, and computing power. As the report outlines, we must also pay attention to other dimensions of AI, such as into institutional construction, talent training, and measurement and evaluation for effects. Third, AI is highly concentrated. Currently, AI infrastructure and frontline models are highly concentrated in a couple of economies. As a result, the majority of countries, especially the Global South, fail to participate in standard making. For instance, China, thanks to systematic cooperation with the UN, has been able to empower developing countries. Fourth, AI has deepened the gap between governance In reality, AI can act on itself and impact— affect the physical world. However, we don't have enough monitoring system. Our surveillance oversight system is still inefficient. Fifth, open-source AI provides key support to AI. It has— it is an unforeseeable opportunity for developing countries. Developers must combine design with actual needs. Of course, open source is not the solution to all, but it is transparent and cooperative. It embodies UN's key values in building an inclusive AI. Last but not least, our research has encountered bottlenecks First, we can hardly measure the real impact of governance, be it for a business or for a country. The real conditions cannot be evaluated in a comprehensive manner. Second, we lack evidence from the Global South because the capabilities are highly concentrated. The basis of our evidence is, on balance, the Global South. Cannot effectively participate in this research. As a result, the global cognitive deficit is deepening. In other words, our risks are higher. I would like to now summarize the outcome. Scientific measurement is the foundation of all. The international community must build an equitable and measurable framework. This is our historic mission. I would like to invite you to continue follow-up with our work. Let's discuss security and build civilizations together. Thank you. I just want to highlight how every person you have on the— in front of you today comes from a different country. You have Mena from Egypt, Joël from France, Loretta from Chile, Ravi from India, Philippines, Canada, Rita from Nigeria, Anna from Finland, and Song from China. We'll wrap it— oh yeah, did you notice the gender balance? Good, good. Just two final words. I think most of us underestimate the possibility that the intelligence of AIs will continue to grow. It sounds like science fiction, But it's a real possibility, and it could change the world in ways that we don't understand yet. And it could change the power dynamics of our planet in ways that require our attention. We'll wrap it up, and thank you for creating us, for pulling us together. And now we hand you the report, dear Global Dialogue. Please act. Thank you. Thank you, panel members. That concludes our session and it launches the next session, Intergovernmental Dialogue. I invite the co-chairs of the dialogue to please come back to the stage. Your Excellencies, distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen, the next session will be the high-level government plenary segment, Harnessing the Benefits of AI for All Through Inclusive and Interoperable Approaches. And we kindly invite back to the podium the United Nations Secretary-General, the President of the General Assembly, the ITU Secretary-General, the UNESCO Director-General, and the United Nations Tech Envoy. Thank you. Thank you, scientific panel co-chairs, and we extend our sincere appreciation to you and members of AI panel for presenting this important preliminary report. We now turn from scientific assessment to the perspectives of member states. The next segment of our program, the high-level governmental plenary segment provides an opportunity for governments to share national and regional experiences, priorities, best practices, and approaches to AI governance, while also reflecting on expectations for international cooperation. Before we begin, may we invite back to the podium the UNSG PGA, the ITU SG, Mr. Chi, the UNESCO Director-General, and the TECNY. Will you take this one or I'll take this one? No, you take this one. Okay. So allow me to briefly outline the format of this session based on guidance received from the UN Department for General Assembly and Conference Management. Statements will be delivered on the basis of a speakers list established through inscription. Any changes in delegations may be notified to the Secretariat during the meeting through the protocol officers present in the room. You are all invited to speak from the lecterns. Speaking time will be limited to 3 minutes for individual member states interventions and 5 minutes for head of states and government, deputy ministers, vice presidents, and representatives delivering statements on behalf of regional groups or other groupings. A timer has been set and is visible on the screens as well as on the lecterns. We kindly encourage all speakers to respect the allotted time so that the largest possible number of delegations may be accommodated during this segment. To ensure the fairness and allow broad participation, microphones will be automatically switched off once the allocated speaking time has expired. We therefore respectfully request speakers to conclude their remarks within the prescribed time limits. With that, we are pleased to open the high-level governmental plenary segment on harnessing the benefits of AI for all through inclusive and interoperable approaches. We will now proceed directly to the speakers list. I invite our first speaker, President of the Estonian Republic, Mr. Alar Karis. You have the floor. Honorable Leaders, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen. Estonia's digital story has always been about more than technology. It has been about trust between citizens and the state, in services that work, in protected data and innovation that strengthens freedom. Artificial intelligence brings us to a new stage. Estonia's message is simple: AI must create value for people. It should make societies more efficient, resilient, human-centered, and innovative, while remaining anchored in democracy and the rule of law. Let me expand on these core values. First, AI must be human-centered. Technology must serve people, businesses, and society. It should help doctors spend time more with patients, enable teachers to support every learner, allow entrepreneurs to create higher-value products, and help public servants reduce bureaucracy. Second, AI must be trustworthy. People need to know when AI is being used, how data is handled, and how— who remains responsible for decisions. Where rights and opportunities are affected, AI-supported decisions must be explainable and accountable. Third, AI governance must protect democracy and the rule of law. AI should strengthen public trust, not weaken unit. And fourth, AI must be secure and resilient by design. Estonia's experience as a digital state has taught us that cybersecurity is a foundation. AI systems must be protected against misuse, manipulation, cyberattacks, and disruption. In a world where digital systems AI governance are part of national security. Resilience is a democratic value. And fifth, AI governance must enable innovation. Regulation is necessary, but it must also allow useful and responsible AI to grow in healthcare, education, business, and public services. Estonia is putting these principles into practice through est.ai, or Estonia.ai, which helps apply AI to add value to people's work and the economy, and through AI Leap, which prepares schools for the age of artificial intelligence. AI Leap gives students and teachers access to AI-based learning tools, and helps them to use these tools critically, creatively, and responsibly. The national initiative supports students and teachers to use AI for meaningful learning instead of offloading their thinking effort. This is also a question of equality. If AI changes every sector of society, then every person must have the chance to understand it. AI literacy must reach society widely, from schools to workplace and public institutions. The future of AI governance should be open, democratic, and practical. We need interoperable rules, shared standards, and cooperation among democratic partners. The global task is to build trustworthy AI that strengthens free societies. Thank you very much for your attention. Muchísimas gracias, señor presidente. Thank you very much. I now have the distinguished honour to give the I now give the floor to the Vice President of the Republic of El Salvador, His Excellency Félix Ulloa. President of the General Assembly, Secretary-General, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. This dialogue is an historic opportunity in the multilateral sphere to address one of the most relevant transformations of our time, one which is setting the course for our nations. The transformative capacity of artificial intelligence in health, education, agriculture, industry, security, justice, and public administration is opening up unprecedented opportunities to strengthen public services, to boost productivity, and to improve the quality of life for millions of people. For this reason, we must place AI at the service of the common good and the development of our peoples. However, any disruptive innovation requires responsible governance. Our challenge is not one of slowing technological progress, but rather of building frameworks of trust which will allow AI to develop with transparency, security, respect for human rights, and a deep-rooted sense of ethics. El Salvador seeks to actively participate in the knowledge economy, to develop our national capacities and contribute to building solutions which respond to our own realities. From this conviction, we have decided to place ourselves as an active builder of our own model of governance. El Salvador has developed a normative ecosystem for AI which includes the Artificial Intelligence and Technology Promotion Act, one of the first of its kind in Latin America. It adopts an approach which seeks to balance the promotion of innovation with responsible risk management, the protection of personal data, and the building of trust among citizens. On the basis of this framework, we established our National Artificial Intelligence Agency as the guiding governing body in this area. With this agency, we are seeking to ensure that AI does not progress in a disparate way, but rather with strategic direction, clear rules, and a pro-innovation vision. For us, this is the value of having a specialized institution, converting governance in practical capacity to innovate, to attract opportunities, and to apply technologies in a way that they serve people. The commitment— institutional commitment El Salvador to responsible AI is not limited to the legislative and the executive. It is also reflected in relevant legal rulings on the responsible use of AI in the public sector and in the administration of justice. This jurisprudence reiterates an essential principle that El Salvador defends in forums such as this: AI AI can strengthen the effectiveness and quality of public services, but it cannot replace responsibility, human judgment, and oversight in decisions that affect fundamental rights and guarantees. Our experience shows that governance and innovation are not counterposed objectives. On the contrary, smart regulation, robust institutions, and a strategic vision build trust, attract investment, and promote economic and social development. For these reasons, we consider it is essential to strengthen international cooperation, to bridge the digital divide, to share good practices, to develop technical capacity, and to ensure that no country remains excluded from the benefits of AI. President, AI governance will progress best if used to facilitate interoperability, trust, and practical cooperation between states, the private sector, academia, civil society, and international organizations. Internationally, our country has reiterated its commitment to open, responsible, and innovation-oriented governance. By way of its recent incorporation into the PAC-SILICA initiative and its signing of the joint declaration on the opportunities of artificial intelligence. This is compounded by national advances with three principles guiding our vision: innovation, trust, and international cooperation, the very foundation of effective governance which can generate prosperity. Thank you very much to you all and have a very good day. Thank you very much, Vice President. We now welcome the President of Georgia, His Excellency Mikheil Kavelashvili. Mr. Secretary-General, Madam President, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. The pace of technological progress today is unprecedented in human history. The rapid development of artificial intelligence has fundamental impact on all three pillars of the United Nations' work: peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development. In artificial intelligence, we are dealing not merely with a new technical instrument, but with an autonomous force that, for the first time in human history, is capable of making decisions independently, generating new ideas, and producing influential narratives. The misuse or bad faith use of this technology may distort perceptions of reality to such an extent as to trigger global instability. Language and culture are the foundation of our civilization. If artificial intelligence causes us to lose control over them, the very essence of humanity and the future of humankind will be placed at risk. We must clearly recognize the political nature of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is, by its very nature, a centralized technology. The creation of advanced models requires the mobilization of colossal financial resources, computational capacities, and large-scale data. This unprecedented concentration of power must not become an instrument of totalitarian control, a new digital tyranny that infringes upon national sovereignty and individual liberty. It is our shared responsibility to create a robust international legal architecture that will balance concentrated power, avert geopolitical chaos, and ensure that this immense resource serves the welfare, security, and stability of all mankind rather than the domination of individual actors. Placing artificial intelligence at the service of the future generation and effectively preventing existential risks are decisive for shaping a secure, inclusive, and sustainable digital future. Our foremost task is to align these digital systems with human values, so that artificial intelligence becomes a catalyst for the expansion of human potential, innovation, and the progress of humankind. Artificial intelligence must become an instrument for understanding the world and achieving major scientific breakthroughs, one capable of transforming medicine, biology, in quantum physics, overcoming diseases that have until now been incurable, eradicating poverty, effectively responding to climate challenges, and addressing the most complex philosophical questions confronting humankind. Artificial intelligence must be humanity's partner in uncovering the mysteries of the universe. To achieve these objectives, It is essential to elevate international cooperation to a qualitatively new level. We must lay the foundation for an open, free, secure, and inclusive digital future that will reliably protect human dignity and fundamental rights, both in physical and virtual spaces. In this context, the effective implementation of the United Nations Global Digital Compact is of particular importance. I am pleased to have the opportunity on behalf of Georgia to participate in the first global dialogue on artificial intelligence of such scale and significance. Today's forum is a clear and promising example of precisely this global effort. I wish the participants of the forum productive work. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Muchísimas gracias, señor— Thank you very much, President Kavelashvili. We now wish a warm welcome to the President of the Presidential Council of Libya, His Excellency Mohamed Menfi. Ladies and gentlemen, co-presidents of this dialogue, Secretary General, President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, may I extend the greetings of Libya at the heart of the African Sahara, where the dunes of the desert cross with the waters of the Mediterranean. I extend the greetings of Libya, corridor of North Africa, to make our contribution with regard to the possibilities offered by this new, promising, and transformative technology. Allow me to convey the aspirations and views of an African country through a unified African position. This dialogue is an international dialogue seeking to lay the foundations for the use of a transformative technology which could change all of our lives, avoiding reproducing the errors of the past when we left half of humanity outside of technology. Today, many African countries are seeing situations of insecurity or conflict which would not allow them to take their place on the international stage. We understand that such circumstances exist, but African people have the right to lift this injustice and to change that situation. This is why we today are making our voice heard so that we can have due influence on the different aspect of AI, whether in ethics or in technology. When we speak about an AI gap, we are not only speaking about a digital divide, we are speaking about a divide in terms of employment, jobs. And use. We are also talking about a divide in terms of the ability to harness the potential of AI. The African continent represents 1.4 billion people, 10% of the global population, who have fewer than 2% of global data centers. We have even fewer patents in terms of AI. These are not simple statistics. These numbers have a direct impact on the lives of African citizens and the citizens of the Global South. This is evidence of inequitable distribution of resources and of possibilities coming out of bad will in terms of the sharing of resources, benefits, and technology. Within NEPAD, we have adopted 5 principles. First of all, in terms of distribution, AI cannot be a legitimate resource if African countries cannot make use of it. Today, we are calling for the ability to ensure effective participation in the guiding principles and rules and their design, which— where they will govern our future. Secondly, with regard to the digital divide, this divide is not fatalistic. It is the result of several circumstances: impossibility of having the final product of AI, impossibility of financing digital infrastructure in our countries, at the appropriate prices. And then fourthly, a lack of researchers and scientists in the field in Africa. The third principle is the possibility of access to data. We know that data is one of the key resources for AI. As we have refused that our natural resources be ceded, we also refuse that our data be exploited. Created without us being able to benefit from it. We must ensure that— we know that data centers require a lot of energy and electricity, which leads to greenhouse gas emissions. We know that African countries are those participating least in greenhouse gas emissions. And today we are not benefiting truly from these data centers. I'd like to thank President Menfi for his intervention. We now give the floor to the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, His Excellency Luc Frieden. Mr. Secretary-General, co-chairs, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Technological progress has shaped the fortunes of generations throughout history, and AI is a technology of our time, of our generation. While artificial intelligence as a concept continues to evolve, to generative AI, to agentic AI, maybe tomorrow to superintelligence. It is for us the real question whether this evolving AI will bring humanity closer together or drive us apart. The Global Digital Compact gives us, I think, the right ambition to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared by all. That commitment must now become a reality. Our objective should be clear: to build an AI that people trust. And therefore, congratulations and thank you for the useful report of the scientific panel, because I think that will help us as policy leaders to make the right choices. Because like any technology, AI is value neutral, and that means it presents us with a choice, a choice of what we make of it, how we use it, and for what ends. This choice cannot be made by any country alone. Protecting human dignity, defending democracy, safeguarding human rights including those of the most vulnerable, especially children. And as was mentioned this morning in the report as well, and ensuring that AI contributes to sustainable development, they are collective responsibilities. This is why multilateralism is not optional. It is essential. History teaches us that whenever transformative technologies reshape our societies, International norms and institutions must adapt too. This is a huge challenge for us as political leaders. Our responsibility is not to choose between innovation and protection. We must advance both together. And therefore, I strongly believe that we must build an international framework that allows AI to develop in a safe, trustworthy, and human-centered way. Take the military application of AI as a very real and concerning example. As AI integrates into defense systems and the conduct of warfare, human judgment and responsibility must never be surrendered in decisions over life or death. This is why I believe that wherever voluntary principles fall short, we must be prepared to establish binding international rules. Mesdames et messieurs, établir des normes communes— Ladies and gentlemen, establishing common standards doesn't mean that we do so in uniformity. We have to make sure that we respect our linguistic diversity and cultural diversity. This is a firm conviction not only of my own country, Luxembourg, but also of all of the United Nations. We don't want AI which uniforms the world, which makes it uniform. We want it to be able to reflect the diversity of languages, cultures, and societies. In Brussels, I recently argued for an AI of Europe by Europe and for Europe. Today, let me broaden that vision here for all the peoples of the United Nations. And echoing what the Secretary-General, António Guterres, said at the beginning, I would say we need an AI of humanity, by humanity and for humanity, one that serves every society, benefits every nation, and remains accountable to us all. Thank you. I thank His Excellency Luc Frieden, Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Next speaker is His Excellency Russell Dlamini, Prime Minister of Eswatini. You have the floor. Thank you. Your Excellencies, heads of United Nations agencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, I have the honor to deliver these remarks on behalf of His Majesty the King and on behalf of the people of the Kingdom of Eswatini. We meet In Geneva at a defining moment for humanity. Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant innovation. It is already shaping how we learn, how we govern, trade, communicate, heal, produce food, and protect our environment. The question be— of— before us is therefore not whether AI will change our societies, but whether we will guide that change in a manner that protects human dignity, strengthens development, and preserves the diversity of the human family. For countries such as the Kingdom of Eswatini, AI governance must begin with a simple principle: technology must serve the people. It must improve daily life, expand opportunity, and support the digitization of essential public services and strengthen institutions that serve our citizens. It must help us address practical needs including food security, healthcare, education, public administration, climate resilience, job job creation and sustainable economic growth. AI must not be allowed to narrow the world into a single understanding of progress, identity, or values. Its tools, data, and development pathways must be infused with cultural sensitivity and respect for different normative traditions, languages, values, social context, and standards. Responsible AI should not drive humanity towards one homogeneous coalescence. It should enable diverse, relevant, and locally meaningful outcomes. This is especially important for small developing states. They must not become mere consumers of technologies designed elsewhere, trained on realities unlike their own, and deployed without regard to their development priorities. Developing states must be supported to build sovereign capability, local innovation, digital literacy, research capacity, computing access, and trusted data ecosystems. Equitable growth in AI requires equitable capacity However, innovation cannot flourish without trust. AI governance must be human-centric in design, deployment, and accountability. Algorithms must be required to adhere to human rights, safety, transparency, fairness, and public interest standards. AI systems must not self-regulate, nor should they be permitted to determine their own growth path outside clear human authority. Human judgment, responsibility, and oversight must remain at the center. The protection of minors is paramount. Children must be allowed to develop as children, protected from manipulation exploitation, unsafe content, harmful profiling, addictive design, and premature shaping of their identities by systems they cannot fully understand. No society should outsource childhood learning or moral formation to machines. Legal and governance frameworks must therefore be enforceable nationally and supra- Nationally, voluntary principles are important, but they are not enough. We need rules that can be audited, remedies that can be accessed, responsibilities that can be assigned, and cooperation that reaches across borders. This includes stronger safeguards for privacy, cybersecurity, data protection, and the integrity of critical infrastructure. I thank you. I thank the distinguished Prime Minister of Eswatini, His Excellency Mr. Rastel Dlamini. Next speaker is His Excellency Krzysztof Kawkowski, Deputy Prime Minister of Poland. Madam President, Mr. Secretary-General, distinguished guests, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you to the United Nations and to the hosters making for this dialogue is possible. Poland treats artificial intelligence not only as a topic of debate, but as a practical tool shaping public policy. We support international cooperation because effective governance requires shared responsibility. This means AI must be human-centric and safe in real-world Youth. It should protect rights and freedoms, ensure fairness and privacy, while enabling innovation and economic growth. We see AI as a part of a connected system linking research, industry, public administration, and society. Strong cooperation is essential when public institutions set direction, while partnerships with researchers and businesses help scale solutions. In Poland, the priority is application of AI. We are deploying AI and healthcare administration to improve efficiency, simplify procedures and expert access. We also focus on high-quality data. Public data, when properly protected, drives innovation and allows smaller actors to participate. Investment in scale is quite important when we stretch digital education to respond to job market changes and ensures inclusive progress. At the same time, we address risk through standards, transparency, and measures against disinformation and harmful abuse. Poland is committed to close international cooperation because AI crosses borders, so governance must as well. We focus on participatory IMPACT, which safeguards and cooperates a human-centric AI can deliver real benefits while respecting fundamental values and human rights. Thank you very much. I thank distinguished His Excellency Krzysztof Kawkowski, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs of Poland. Next speaker is His Excellency Zaslán Madiev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of Kazakhstan. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, we highly value our partnership with the UN system in promoting regional digital initiatives. In Almaty, Kazakhstan is advancing two UN-backed regional platforms: UN Regional SDG Centre for Central Asia and Afghanistan, UN ESCAP Asia and Pacific Digital Solutions Center for Sustainable Development. Together, the two centers will strengthen regional cooperation and support the 2030 Agenda. We welcome interested member states to consider seconding national experts to the center, which we see as a regional sandbox for testing and scaling best digital solutions. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has set a clear objective to build a fully digital nation within the next 3 years. This year in Kazakhstan has been announced the Year of Digitalization and AI. We have built world-class govtech infrastructure. Our country ranks 24th in the UN eGovernment Development Index. 92% of public services are available online. 90% of transactions are cashless. All personal documents are digitized and legally equivalent to paper originals. In developing AI, we focus on key areas: institutions, infrastructure, and human capital development. First, institutions. A new constitution guarantees citizens' digital rights, including the right to personal data protection. We have adopted the Digital Code, the Law on AI, and the Law on Cybersecurity. On AI security that regulate ethical standards and labeling of AI products. The Head of State approved the national strategy Digital Kazakhstan that marks our transition from advanced e-government to an AI-enabled nation. Second, infrastructure. By the end of next year, more than 90% of villages in Kazakhstan will have access to high-speed broadband internet connectivity. Through fiber optic. The Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic Corridor will be completed this year, establishing a digital corridor between East and West, between Europe and Asia. Last year, Kazakhstan launched the two largest supercomputer clusters in the region. Now we expand our AI tokens economy. Data Center Valley project in Kazakhstan aims at least 1 gigawatt of AI compute infrastructure. Third, human capital development. Kazakhstan is introducing AI across all levels of education and professional training. The President of Kazakhstan has signed a decree to embed AI in secondary schools. AI research university to be launched this September with global university partners. The International Center for AI, Alem AI, is becoming common platform for education education, research, startups, business, and government. Advanced startup ecosystem Astana Hub started to bring AI unicorns to the world from Kazakhstan. Distinguished colleagues, basic approaches should be compatible: data protection, safety, transparency, accountability, and the ability to exchange solutions internationally. Kazakhstan is open to you. Cooperation. We are ready to share our experience, launch joint pilots, and develop interoperable approaches to AI governance. Thank you for your kind attention. I thank His Excellency Zhatlan Madiev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of Kazakhstan. Next speaker is Her Excellency Enhameng Amadiara, Deputy Prime Minister of Madam President, Your Excellencies, it is an honor to address this first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance on behalf of the Kingdom of Lesotho. Lesotho aligns itself with the statements delivered by the Group of 77, China, and the Africa Group, and wishes to add the following observations in its national capacity. We welcome this dialogue as a timely opportunity to ensure that AI serves the interests of all countries and all peoples. We also welcome the preliminary report of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. Its evidence-based approach rightly underscores that the future impact of AI will depend not only on the technology itself, but on the policy of AI— will depend not only, but on the policy choices which governments and the international community make today. Those choices will determine whether AI widens existing inequalities or becomes a catalyst for inclusive and sustainable development. For small and developing states, the central challenge is not simply access to AI technologies, but the capacity to participate meaningfully in their development, governance, and application. This requires investment in human capital, data systems, institutions, and digital infrastructure. As the chair of the AU Specialized Committee on Communications and ICT, Lesotho's AI Policy of 2025 is broadly aligned with these priorities, particularly in promoting capacity building, AI-ready data, openness, human oversight, and inclusive development. Excellencies, Lesotho wishes to highlight four priorities. First, capacity building. Without the necessary skills, institutions, and technical expertise, countries cannot regulate AI effectively, deploy it responsibly, or participate meaningfully in shaping global AI governance. Second, openness. Open source software, open data, open standards, and open models can reduce dependency lower costs, foster innovation, and enable countries to adopt AI solutions to their local context and development priorities. Third, interoperability and digital infrastructure. Responsible public sector AI depends on robust digital public infrastructure, including digital identity systems, electronic government services, secure data exchange mechanisms, and strong cybersecurity frameworks. Fourth, sector-led and risk-based governance through existing regulatory institutions. AI governance should build upon established sectoral regulators and legal frameworks. Where AI affects fundamental rights or the delivery of public services, meaningful human oversight Transparency and effective mechanisms for accountability and redress must remain central. Lesotho also proposes the development of a framework for AI-ready unstructured and fragmented data. Many African countries do not lack data. Rather, they lack data which is organized, interoperable, and prepared for responsible AI use. Global AI governance should therefore support countries in transforming fragmented public sector data into secure, trusted, and locally relevant data resources which can drive innovation and sustainable development. As the international community shapes the future of AI governance, we must ensure that no country is left behind. AI governance must be practical, inclusive, and development-oriented. It must strengthen national capacities, promote openness, support trusted and AI-ready data, manage risks, and uphold meaningful human oversight so that artificial intelligence becomes a tool for shared prosperity and sustainable development for all. I thank you. I thank Her Excellency Ntumeng Majara, Deputy Prime Minister of Lesotho. Next speaker is Her Excellency Gabriela González, DPR of Uruguay, on behalf of the G77 and China. Excellencies, I have the honor to deliver this speech in the name of the Group of G77 and China. First, let me thank the co-chairs for his excellent work during this process. Also, to the joint secretariat by UNESCO and ITU, and supported by the Office of the ODET and the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, and all the United Nations entities have contributed to preparing this important milestone. The full version of this statement will be on the page of the, of the of this dialogue. Excellencies, building on the first landmark General Assembly resolution on artificial intelligence adopted in 2024, followed by the Global Digital Compact, member states have shown that they can deliver— mutualists can deliver on this matter. In a short period, the community has laid the foundation of an emerging United Nations architecture for AI governance. Today, with the publication of the panel that we just recently heard, the dialogue— we are witnessing the first substantive output in this architecture. Preliminary report confirmed throughout scientific evidence that many concerns consistently raised by developing countries throughout this process. It highlights that artificial intelligence capabilities, computing infrastructure, data resources, models, and technical expertise remain highly concentrated. It also underlines that access to AI and the capacity to govern it are very distributed, and without sustained investment in infrastructure, skills, institutions, data, and governance capacity, AI risks reinforcing existing inequalities rather than reducing them. These findings reinforce the urgency of our collective work. They also confirm the next phase of AI governance must focus on implementation. Excellencies, our group— for our group, AI is first and foremost a development issue. If governed responsibly, inclusively, and in a manner that supports international cooperation, AI can accelerate progress towards Sustainable Development Goals. It can improve public services, strengthen education, health systems, enhance agricultural productivity, support climate change, resilience, modernize public administration, foster innovation, and contribute to economic diversification. However, these benefits will not materialize automatically. They will depend on whether developing countries have infrastructure, capacity, financing, technology, and policy space required to participate meaningfully in AI ecosystems. For that, AI governance cannot succeed if it's not shaped be achieved only by those who already possess great technological capabilities. It can only succeed if all countries are empowered to participate meaningfully in developing, deploying, and governing artificial intelligence. Bridging the digital divide, including AI divide, must therefore become one of the defining objectives of international cooperation. The next AI divide will not simply increasingly be about access to technology. It will increasingly be about access to capacity to shape technology, to develop it, to govern it, adapt it to national context, and ensure that it serves sustainable development. Closing that divide is not only the interest of developing countries, it is the interest of building a more inclusive, resilient, representative global AI ecosystem that benefits all. Throughout the preparatory process of this dialogue, developing countries have consistently emphasized AI governance should promote sustainable development while contributing to a fully inclusive and people-centered digital ecosystem, including through the promotion of information integrity, tolerance, and respect of digital space. The group believed that our collective efforts should focus on delivering practical outcomes. In this regard, we'd like to highlight 4 areas that could give our world a period ahead. First, strengthening artificial intelligence capacity building as a permanent pillar International cooperation. Capacity building should move beyond isolated training activities and support development and strengthening institutions, universities, research centers, innovation ecosystems, regulatory authorities, and public administration. Technology transfer, technical cooperation for access and data digital infrastructure, and strengthened South-South cooperation must also remain integral components of our collective efforts. Second, Operation Innovative Voluntary Financing Options for artificial intelligence capacity building. Financing should become an internal component of global artificial intelligence governance, enabling developing countries to build infrastructure, human capacity, capital, and institutional capacity required to meaningfully artificial intelligence ecosystem. The Secretary General report Innovative Volatile Financial Options just showed the way that we can move forward. The third, making Global Dialogue platform that connect discussion with implementation beyond exchanging views. Fourth, continuing strengthening coherence across the United Nations system. The Independent International Panel and the broader United Nations system would work— I thank the distinguished representative of Uruguay who gave a statement on behalf of the G77 and China. To the Permanent Representative of Zambia, Her Excellency Eunice Luambia, who's speaking on behalf of the Group of Friends for International Cooperation on AI Capacity Building. Madam, you have the floor. Thank you, Madam President, Excellencies, distinguished delegates. I have the honor to speak on behalf of the Group of Friends for International Cooperation on AI capacity building. AI technologies are advancing rapidly and creating tremendous opportunities for economic and social development in all countries. At the same time, AI divide continues to widen, and the high-speed advancement of AI creates new risks. In response to these challenges, the Group of Friends puts forward the following proposals. First, promote fairness and inclusiveness so that AI benefits every country and everyone. We call for adherence of the purpose and principles of the UN Charter and respect for international law in building global AI governance. The United Nations plays— should play the central coordinating role in international development cooperation. We further take note the Global Divide— the Global Digital Compact and its commitment to closing AI divide between and within countries. All countries have the equal right to design, develop, deploy, and use AI, and to choose development paths suited to their national conditions to safeguard technological sovereignty, national security, and development interests. We emphasize the importance of promoting and preserving linguistic, and cultural diversity and support the development of multilingual AI. The global dialogue should uphold to the mandate in accordance with Resolution 79/325 and the principles of fairness, inclusiveness, and non-discrimination. Particularly, priority should be given to developing countries, including countries in special situations, and to people in vulnerable situations. Second, deepen openness and cooperation to build a fair, inclusive, and effective governance framework. We call on the global dialogue to contribute to maximizing digital inclusive inclusion, enhancing the interoperability of AI governance frameworks, standards, and norms, and jointly safeguarding the stability of global industrial development and supply chains. We reiterate that states are strongly urged to refrain from promulgating and applying unilateral economic measures not in accordance with international law and the UN Charter. We encourage the development of open source software, open models, and the sharing and mutual benefit of AI resources, as well as ensuring non-discriminatory access to data, especially learning data, while respecting intellectual property rights. We emphasize that AI models and algorithms should be transparent, accountable, and unbiased. We stress that AI developers and suppliers should comply with the national legislation of countries where their technologies are used, particularly in the areas of data and information security. We proceed from the premises that AI is a safe, secure, and trustworthy technology. We call on this global dialogue to promote an interoperable framework for AI safety cooperation and to share risk assessment tools and safety testing data through South-South, North-South, and triangular cooperation. Third, prioritize development pillar and advance the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We pay close attention to the long-term impact of AI on energy consumption, the ecological environment, employment structures, and social equity. AI should empower industries and improve people's livelihoods, serving as a new engine for sustainable development. We encourage the Global Dialogue to place capacity building at the center of its work, assess current capability gaps, and put forward concrete proposals for strengthening cooperation. The Global Dialogue should give practical effect to the capacity building objectives of the Global Digital Compact, including by developing innovative voluntary financing options for artificial intelligence, capacity building, ensuring that financing, the transfer of technology and skills, and development are directed to where the need is greatest. We encourage all parties to make positive contributions to digital infrastructure connectivity in developing countries and support efforts to assist developing countries in building data centers, computing facilities, and high-speed networks through technical assistance, financial support, and capacity building. Excellencies, the Group of Friends will continue to serve as a bridge for international cooperation. I'd like to thank the distinguished Permanent Representative of Zambia on behalf of the Group of Friends for International Cooperation on AI capacity building. The floor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Francophonie and Congolese Abroad, His Excellency Konstantin Sergej Wunder. Minister, you have the floor. Excellences, distinguished heads of state and heads of government, distinguished representatives, distinguished Secretary-General of the United Nations. Co-chairs, distinguished participants, we extend our greetings to you. I would like first and foremost to share the fraternal greetings of His Excellency Denis Sassou Nguesso, the President of the Republic of Congo, who mandated me to participate in this global dialogue on AI governance. I would like also to express the deep appreciation of the Republic of Congo to the United Nations, also to the ITU, to UNESCO, and to all of the partners who came together to make this historic meeting possible. Your commitment demonstrates the will of the international community to construct together in a spirit of multilateralism which is renewed governance of AI, which is based on trust, solidarity, and shared responsibility. AI could become one of the major transforming vectors of our era. It offers remarkable opportunities for accelerating the realization of the SDGs, for example, and the African Union agenda, as well as to improve access to essential services and strengthen resilience of our societies. At the same time, however, it raises a number of legitimate challenges with regard to ethics, security, protection of data, disinformation, and a risk of exclusion. It is because we need to respond to these two aspects—innovation but also preserving human values—that our efforts must converge. Under the impulsion of the President of the Republic of Congo, we have made a proactive approach. Our country has committed to strengthening our digital ecosystem, specifically through the creation of a dedicated ministry dedicated to the digital economy, while focusing particularly on capacity building, competency training, research, and coming up with an adapted governance framework adapted to the challenges. An African research center for AI in the Nsisengo University is an important step forward. This aims to train a new generation of researchers and African innovators who will promote AI which is ethical and will also develop their priorities for the continent. Here, Congo has benefited from the economic support community from the United Nations and PNUD's support as well. The dialogue which is bringing us together today, ladies and gentlemen, helps us to form global consensus— The speaker is interrupted. The distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs, Francofonie and Congolise Abroad, thank you so much. And now we give the floor to the Minister of Communication and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Abdullah Al-Zawahiri. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to quote the Koran. "We have raised some of them above others in rank so that they may depend on one another through mutual service." End quote. This is a quotation from the Koran. It is divine, and it demonstrates that we created not to be in competition, but to complement each other's efforts, excellencies. Secretary-General of the United Nations. Ladies and gentlemen, 90% of the compute today, as well as IPs in terms of AI, are held in two countries, only two countries. Is that the future that the United Nations accepts for more than 190 member states? Today, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has instructions to— under the service of the leaders of our country— to be main partners to reduce this gap and to lead in collective action to make sure that the era of AI ensures inclusivity, joint action, We have combined these efforts. We've been working since the G20 summit with the first declaration which was made at the adoption of the OECD Principles for Safe AI. We made considerable efforts, investments to make sure that the next decade will allow us to reach 6 gigawatts over the next few years, whereas the entire world will need more than 80 gigawatts. Just to keep that in mind, Saudi Arabia leads the list according to Bloomberg lists. We are educating young people, women. We're leading also in terms of AI centers. We're very proud of our partnership with the United Nations to have centers that study the ethical questions of AI. 10 years ago, this room decided to declare the internet as an essential necessity, and we have failed collectively. This year, if we fail to declare artificial intelligence as an existential necessity for the people, planet, and prosperity, the next generations will never forgive us. And this is why the Kingdom stands as your partner of choice for making this happen. Thank you. I thank the distinguished Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia, and I now I give the floor to Minister Gonzalo Matías, Minister in the Cabinet of the Prime Minister and of State Reform. Dear co-chairs, ladies and gentlemen, when we discuss AI governance, we often ask how to regulate artificial intelligence. It is also important to reflect on how we govern its implementation. Because the real challenge is no longer whether AI will exist. The challenge is whether governments can deploy it responsibly and scale and in ways that improve people's lives. Portugal has approved a national AI agenda that is not another strategy document. It is an implementation agenda. We are bringing AI into government itself, not as a future ambition, but as a practical tool to simplify licensing procedures, modernize public procurement, improve healthcare, and strengthen crisis response. This is why we call, uh, the Agentic State: AI at the service of citizens, accelerating decisions and anticipating needs, and the responsible, ethical, and human-centric decisions. We are building digital twins of public administration so that governments can test policies before implementing them in the real world. Portugal is taking advantage of its unique geostrategic position and talent, renewable energy, and proximity to submarine cables to launch AI gigafactories. Renewable energy is key to assure sustainability. An example of, of that is the joint project with Spain to receive one of the European AI gigafactories, making the Iberian Peninsula a hub for AI sustainable production and digital sovereignty. And because language is also sovereignty, we launched Amália, the first open LLM model built specifically for European— for Portuguese culture. It is designed not only for government, but for citizens, researchers, and companies to build AI solutions in our own language, spoken by almost 300 million people. These are not isolated projects. They reflect a broader conviction: governments should not simply regulate AI, they should become responsible adopters of AI. Effective coordination between the United Nations, the OECD, and European Union, and other relevant organizations Nations remain essential, with each contributing according to its mandate and expertise. That's how we believe it should be regulated. This claims for reinforcement of multilateralism, international law, and global law as critical instruments to harness, to empower AI while empowering also it to serve lives of people. International cooperation should focus on implementing the commitments already undertaken making, strengthening interoperability between governance frameworks, and promoting capacity building and ensuring that countries at different stages of digital development can all benefit from AI. Thank you very much. I thank His Excellency Gonzalo Matías, Minister of Cabinet of the Prime Minister and State of reform. Next speaker is His Excellency Mohammed bin Ali bin Mohammed Al Mannai, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Qatar. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen delegates, may the peace and blessings of God be upon you. We welcome this— the holding of this first session of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. We'd like to thank ITU, UNESCO, the UN, and the co-chairs of the dialogue for their leading roles. Qatar stands convinced of the importance of our Artificial intelligence, this is strategic importance reflected in our AI strategy. We have decided to place AI at the service of humanity in science, in regulation, and in culture. Qatar has 3 objectives here at this dialogue. First of all, bridging divides, calculation and data power, And skills in models being developed are important in many countries. We must guarantee access to calculation models and open source available to all, including in the Arabic language. Secondly, we want to develop safe and secure models. Dangers of insecure models do not know borders. We must develop interoperability capacity between different model governance structures so that decision makers and developers are not subject to the dangers of these structures. Thirdly, the respect of human rights. Here, this is a fundamental principle. It is a matter of trust, and we believe that international law must be respected in our use of AI. We are delighted to announce that we will be launching the Global Initiative on AI under the leadership of the— our country's leader. This is an initiative of a global coalition in AI. And we hope that you can contribute to it. Thank you. Thank you, His Excellency Mohammed bin Ali bin Mohammed Al Mannai, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Qatar. Next speaker is His Excellency Sid Ali Zerouki, Minister of Post and Telecommunications of Algeria. Mr. Secretary-General of the United Nations, Madame PGA, Madame SG of the ITU, Excellencies. Algeria is honored to take the floor at this Global Dialogue on the AI Governance under the UN auspice. I thank the co-chair for the inclusive spirit that guided us in this meeting. We take note with appreciation of the preliminary report on the independent International Scientific Panel on the AI, and thank the panel for its contribution and thinking the opportunity, risk, impact of artificial intelligence. We meet here at this moment. AI is no longer a technological subject. It's a matter of development, sovereignty, security, and human progress. For Algeria, AI governance must be shared internationally responsibly and anchored in dialogue, inclusion, and legitimacy. AI carries two faces. It can support healthcare, education, agriculture, research and development, but without inclusive governance, it can deepen inequality, increase dependency, amplify disinformation and undermine rights. The international community has one responsibility: to guide this technology so that it serves humanity, development, and peace. The current AI governance landscape reveals three concerns. First, the widening gap between countries as AI capacity remains concentrated among limited actors. Second, fragmentation of international efforts, confirming the United Nations as the most legitimate and inclusive platform. Third, the limitation or limited practical impact of existing efforts. Principles are necessary, but without mechanism and measurable progress, they are not sufficient. Algeria reiterates its commitment to arriving at a just, responsible global agreement at the service of humanity. Divide the world between those who design it and design the future and those who merely consume it. It must become a shared instrument of progress, sovereignty, peace, and human dignity. Thank you. I thank His Excellency Sidi Ali Zarouti, Minister of Post and Telecommunications of Algeria. Next speaker is His Excellency Omar Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications of the United Emirates. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the invitation. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, all protocol observed. I come from a country that made a name for itself in identifying potential and realizing it. That can be proven in sectors like logistics, where we started off as an ambitious country on the Arabian Gulf to a country that manages 80 ports around the world and 10% of global trade. The same can also be said about airlines and tourism and artificial intelligence. We realized the potential of artificial intelligence and appointed the first minister for artificial intelligence, as well as the first institution dedicated to higher education in AI. Today, the results are clear. The results are one of the leading countries in the world in the development of AI. Having the infrastructure to shape the future of AI, and also being a country where AI diffusion ranks amongst the highest globally at 70%. We were first this year and amongst the top 3 in the last previous years. For the first time in history, intelligence is no longer just human, and that specific change brings with it raises many questions, questions on the description that is given to technology. There are descriptions that are given to people. People can be merciful or people can be tyrants. And that description is given because of decisions, decisions that people take. A good decision makes you a merciful human. A bad one makes you a tyrant. Technology today, with AI agents and AI more broadly, can take these decisions., and with it can bring upon itself these descriptions. And with this, there is a burden on all of us to try to shape technology to be merciful, to shape technology to support us, and to shape technology to avoid tyranny. History has taught us that to avoid tyranny, we need to try to work on 3 things, and I want to share that with you. The first is the separation of power. And with that, we want to ensure that the many have access to this technology and not just the few. The second, to avoid tyranny, we need to have decentralization. And that is why the UAE is investing in AI infrastructure around the world, in Africa and in South America as well. And the third is independent judiciary to ensure that institutions like the UN can shape the future of AI and can be the custodians of where it takes us. In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, we are the first generation that are going to set the rules for a generation that's going to shape the future of humanity. The decisions that we take today are not just decisions for ourselves and our generation, but for all generations that are to come. And our call is we shouldn't look at the future of technology with a pessimistic lens, but rather an optimistic one. Thank you. We'd like to thank the Minister of State for AI from the UAE. And now we have the opportunity to welcome the Minister of Science, Innovation, Technology, and Telecommunications of Costa Rica, Her Excellency Paula Bogantes Zamora. Buenas tardes. Good afternoon. Good morning, Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates. Often we speak about ensuring that all benefit from AI, but access alone is not inclusion. We live in a world where some countries, a few countries design AI, set its standards, and capture its value, while other countries barely have access to imported systems. That is not an inclusive digital future. Latin America and the Caribbean bring together more than 660 million people but have captured just 1% of global investment in AI. This disproportion reveals that our challenge is not simply of expanding adoption, but also of building decision-making capacity in AI, adopting models in our languages and institutions, producing and governing strategic data, assessing risks, developing our own solution, influencing on international standards, and retaining a fair share of the economic, systemic, and public value that these systems generate. Inclusive AI starts from meaningful connectivity. In 2025, 2.2 billion people remain disconnected throughout the world. Interoperability is essential, but it mustn't oblige all countries to adopt the same laws and institutions or the same regulatory models. Inclusion also requires shared capacity. No country should remain aside because they are not able to independently finance advanced computing innovation laboratories, or specialized talent. Governments must also become market creators. Costa Rica believes that global governance on AI should not be measured by the quantity of principles that we publish, but rather the capacity we build, the inequalities we reduce, and the social values that we retain. AI will not will not in the end be justified by the sophistication of its algorithms, but rather by the impact that it has on people. The true measure of our success will not be to build ever smarter systems, but rather to guarantee that we never lose what makes us human—our dignity, our empathy, our freedom, and our responsibility to the coming generations. AI must help us to anticipate enforced displacements, to protect children, to identify and respond to human crises, and ensure we have sufficient infrastructure faced with cyber war, because AI should not define the future of humanity. It should help humanity. Thank you very much, Minister. We now give the floor to the Minister for Digital Transformation and Civil Service of the Kingdom of Spain, His Excellency Oscar López Águeda. Querido Secretario General, Secretary General, distinguished colleagues, from Spain, we'd like to welcome the work from the scientific panel. That we hosted just a few weeks ago in Madrid. We think excellent work was done there that will set down historic precedents. First of all, the speed of AI is seeing the multiplication of cyber, biological, democratic, and security risks. What we are reading, what we are creating, what we are voting on feeds into AI. And this will be the greatest battle according to the panel. AI is not only a consumer good now, it is a basic foundational structure which is critical in the new global balance of power. The multiple benefits of AI could be undermined by their risks if we don't progress with our own capacities and immediate governance. Science is reminding all governments today that we have a very narrow window of opportunity. As we heard from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, we have very little time to reorient the focus of AI toward interoperability, the discovery of vaccines, gender equality, the fight against climate change, and the reduction of inequalities between the North and the South. AI must be a majority tool, not an exclusive weapon. And governance requires independent evaluation mechanisms, shared standards, and coordination, of course. But we also need the political will from the parties here in Geneva in order to transform evidence into action. This is what we are trying to do from the government of Spain. With Costa Rica, we co-facilitated the process that led to the panel and the dialogue under the Spanish presidency of the EU. We saw the adoption of the first comprehensive AI law, the EU AI Regulation, that we just corrected and expanded in order to prohibit sexual deepfakes and also to protect minors. We were the first European country to set up a supervisory agency for AI and to set down a charter and an observatory of digital rights. But we are not only looking at effectiveness and ethics, we are also seeking to ensure competitiveness and sovereignty. Spain is listening to science, promoting innovation, and defending global dialogue which seeks to combine AI and digital rights. We are speaking no more, no less of defending human rights faced with techno-fascism. We are speaking about our own civilization to move forward or to move back. And you can count on the support of Spain. The whole multilateral system can count on the support of Spain to go forward in regulating and governing AI. Thank you. Thank you, His Excellency Oscar López Agüeda, Minister for Digital Transformation and Civil Service of Spain. Next speaker is His Excellency Li Shengli, Minister of Industry and Information Technology of China. Your Excellencies, President Ms. Baerbock, UNSG Mr. Guterres, co-chairs, heads of states and international organizations, colleagues. AI governance concerns the future of humanity and is a shared task of all countries. Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed Global AI Governance Initiative, calling for inclusive, equitable, and effective AI governance to ensure AI for good. China has consistently supported the UN as the primary channel for global AI governance and has worked to help bridge the global AI divides. To this end, I'd like to make 3 proposals. First, AI for all. Regardless of their size, strength, or social system, all countries have the equal right to develop and benefit from AI. China has launched the AI Capacity Building Action Plan for Good and for All and implemented concrete projects to promote South-South and triangular cooperation. China stands ready to make full use of the Group of Friends for International Cooperation on AI Capacity Building to actively support other countries, especially those in the Global South, in developing AI capabilities and sharing the AI dividend. Second, open-source cooperation and innovation. Open-source AI is a shared asset for all humanity. China open— Chinese open-source models such as Deepseek and Kwang have significantly lowered the barriers and costs of AI adoption. China is committed to further promoting open-source AI for industry, academia, and research institutions, encouraging innovation, AI empowerment, and an inclusive ecosystem through international cooperation, thereby injecting sustained momentum into AI development. Third, jointly building global AI governance. AI presents tremendous opportunities, but it also brings unforeseen risk and challenges. China has therefore put forward the Global AI Governance Action Plan, firmly upholding the principle of balancing between development and safety, advocating technical ethics review and other governance proposals to ensure AI for good. China stands ready to work closely with all parties to advance global AI governance frameworks, standards, and norms based on broad international consensus. Dear colleagues, the development and governance of AI will shape our common future. China calls on all parties to strengthen solidarity to promote AI for good and for all. From 17th to 20th July, China will host the World AI Conference and high-level meetings on global AI governance in Shanghai. I sincerely invite you to join us in person and contribute to advancing global AI development. Thank you. Thank you. Information Technology of China. Next speaker is His Excellency Vann Dinh Chhea, Minister of Post and Telecommunications of Cambodia. Excellency, ladies and gentlemen, Cambodia views today's dialogue with a clear conviction: artificial intelligence has has the potential to transform economies, improve public service, and accelerate sustainable development. Our governance choice should enable this potential, not constrain it. For Cambodia and for many developing nations, the central question is not whether AI should be governed, but how to establish governance that fosters innovation, expand access, build trust, and ensure that the benefits of AI are shared by all. At the same time, we recognize that meaningful adoption requires trust. Cambodia therefore believes AI governance must be risk-based, responsive, and future-oriented, and where necessary, proactive rather than rather than merely reactive. Governance should scale with actual risk, adapt as technology evolves, and anticipate challenges before they materialize. In line with our ASEAN partners, Cambodia has adopted a principle-based approach to AI governance. We view the private sector, academia, civil society, and citizens not as subjects of regulation but as partners in operationalizing AI governance and ethics. This is why we are currently preparing our National AI Governance Framework, a mechanism designed to align all stakeholders and create a dynamic space where sectoral regulators, regulators, industry, and other actors can collaborate as AI capability evolves. Indeed, no country can govern this technology alone. Cambodia sees three concrete areas where the international community can support shared progress. First, by building the technical capacity of regulators, particularly in developing countries. Second, by fostering active exchange of information on emerging AI capability, products, and services. And third, by strengthening cooperation on regulatory experience and incident monitoring so that lessons learned in one jurisdiction can benefit all. Finally, I wish to underscore a simple But often overlooked truth: technological problem requires technological solution. Cambodia calls on technology companies to join hands with government as a junior partner in AI governance. Working together, not— I thank His Excellency Vanda Chea, Minister of Post and Telecommunications of Cambodia. Next speaker is His Excellency Albert Rusty, Federal Councillor and Head of the Federal Department of Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications of Switzerland. Merci. Thank you very much, co-chairs, excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. Switzerland welcomes the launch of this global dialogue on AI governance. The challenges which multilateralism must respond to are ever strong, even though AI will, of course, inevitably change deeply public goods throughout the world. In this context, AI is not only a new object of governance or analysis, but actually it's a lever— a lever, rather— to improve our capacity for action and, through this good, a way to validate the credibility of the international system. Switzerland defends a simple conviction. Which is that the United Nations should not only define the rules of governance of AI, but also show an example, be an example in their practical application. This not only through their methods of work, but also in the development of new forms of cooperation and also in the accomplishment of their mandate for those who they are serving—member states and, of course, populations at the end of the day. I would also like to speak today on behalf of the member states of the Freedom Online Coalition, which Switzerland is presiding over this year. Our joint statement, which was adopted last year— last week, rather, is very clear. Governance of AI must be firmly enshrined in international human rights, international law, and must be elaborated through multi-party processes which are genuine, and which are human-centered. We must also recognize the risks of AI. AI could be used in an abusive way through arbitrary surveillance, diffusing misinformation, weaken our democratic institutions. From the 21st of June, 2027, Switzerland will host in Geneva the next Global Summit on AI. This is the follow-up of the summit which took place in India and in France. You are, of course, most welcome to join the summit. To have better connected standard-setting processes and clear framework, AI— the AI for Good Summit will give us more information as well as an opportunity to contribute to its preparation. Before that exchange, I can already share with you, ladies and gentlemen, our firm conviction in Switzerland with regard to the unique value added of Geneva as one of the best stakeholders to serve multilateralism, and this revolution, which is driven by AI. I thank you very much for your kind attention. Thank you, Federal Councillor and Head of the Federal Department of Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications of Switzerland. Next speaker is Her Excellency Anne Le Hénanf, Delegate Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs of France. Mesdames et messieurs, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. AI, which is omnipresent in our means of communication today, requires inclusive governance. This governance must be focused on UN institutions to make sure that the AI serves the SDGs. Our framework not only needs to cover those usages, but also standards which will help us to evaluate it and deploy it. In order to drive this technology towards common good, we need 5 priorities here. First, Protection of children online with the creation of a G7 line to protect the rights of children before AI, which has been supported by Estonia, Brazil, Morocco, the European Union, and other states, and supported by UN agencies. Secondly, here, multilingualism to make sure that AI reflects the linguistic and cultural diversity of the world. Thirdly, fighting manipulation of information preserve the integrity of our democratic debates. Fourthly, we have to respect the environment. If we think of the summit in Paris, um, for AI and the environment. Fifthly, open-source models to democratize access to this new energy. Common governance needs to allow the freedom of markets, of course, but also allow sovereignty, to respect human rights, and safe, interoperable, reliable AI. It needs to be responsible. It's not— it's a global challenge as well as a local challenge. For those countries that are facing energy problems, we need to make sure that we don't worsen the environmental situation, but We look forward. This is the way forward. France is advancing on this path forward thanks to its energy mix, renewable energies, with Mistral AI, for example, and other efforts. This has guided our G7 presidency, and also this is where we've deployed our different solutions. We call upon all partners to support this international cooperation for governance of AI. These two days are the beginning of the United Nations' response to this challenge, and France is committed to share its experience here and to support these objectives. I thank you very much for your kind attention. I thank you, Excellency, uh, uh, Le Hénanf, Delegate Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs of France. Next speaker is His Excellency David Serré, Minister of Communications and Innovation of of Botswana. Thank you very much, Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon. Botswana welcomes the convening of this inaugural Global Dialogue on AI. This is an important step in implementing— in the implementation of the Global Digital Compact adopted in 2024, through which countries collectively committed to intensifying efforts to bridge the digital divide and strengthen digital infrastructure and promote technological transfer and enhancing capacity-building initiatives. For Botswana, artificial intelligence presents significant opportunity to advancing the attainment of sustainable development goal in many areas. Botswana fully recognize the capabilities of artificial intelligence, what it can do, and the strategically— of artificial intelligence can strategically harness to advance national development priorities across education, agriculture, healthcare, and other key sectors. However, like many developing countries, Botswana continues to suffer challenges in fully harnessing the potential and the benefits of AI. A major constraint is lack of adequate digital infrastructure, digital skills, which limit the capacity of many developing nations to effectively adopt and utilize AI capabilities. We trust that this dialogue, this dialogue will create the space for substantive exchange on how best to support developing countries in harnessing the transformative potential of artificial intelligence. It must serve as a platform for collective action, a platform which responds to the priorities of developing countries in, in form of bridging the digital divide within the nations and strengthen the capacity building to facilitate technological transfer and ensure that no one is left behind. It is imperative that we ensure that ethical considerations are fully integrated to uphold the protection of human rights and respect for the principle of international law. In this regard, establishing and effectively implementing appropriate safeguards and regulatory framework is essential. Botswana emphasizes that the deliberation of this Dialogue should yield practical solutions and actionable recommendations to ensure that it effectively fulfills the objective and purpose for which it was convened for. As I conclude, allow me to reaffirm Botswana's commitments to constructive engagement throughout this dialogue. I thank you very much. of Botswana. Next speaker is His Excellency Sherzod Shermatov, Minister of Digital Technologies of Uzbekistan. Dear participants of today's important dialogue, United Nations serves as an important global institution which is helping the overall global humanity to grow. Together we have approved Sustainable Development Goals which include decreasing of poverty, removing of hunger, improving the quality of education and quality of healthcare. And I think that AI should serve for these purposes so that we together as a global community try to focus on the human development and human improvement. And in Uzbekistan, under the leadership of His Excellency President Mirziyoyev, Uzbekistan is becoming one of the fastest fastest-growing economies in the world with— where we are striving to achieve those global goals. And we are among the leading countries in terms of decreasing the poverty, in terms of decreasing the hunger, as well as improving the quality of education, as well as in healthcare. And we focus on implementing AI in achieving those goals. We are heavily investing into improving of education because the human capital is the most important capital Uzbekistan has. We have implemented 5 Million AI Leaders Program where we try to upskill our population in terms of using AI effectively for the benefit of their future achievements. And also we create conditions for AI companies to develop in Uzbekistan. So that they can harness the green energy, which Uzbekistan is leading in terms of moving towards the green energy, so that Uzbekistan is welcoming international organizations, the companies to invest for green AI data centers. And of course, for Uzbekistan, we try to focus more on human development and we I think that the future AI governance should be focused on those important principles like the inclusiveness. All the countries, including the developing countries, should take part in the AI development agenda. And of course, the open source is important, and we could share the open source models which are really helping the humanity in terms of improving the education, improving of the healthcare. And the trust is also important. And I think that if we work together and if we use these global institutions effectively, together we can really achieve the development of AI for the benefit of human people, humanity as a general. And Uzbekistan is ready to be part of this important movement. Thank you all. I thank His Excellency Sherzod Sherematov, Minister of Digital Technologies of Uzbekistan. Next speaker is His Excellency William Gitau, Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and the Digital Economy of Kenya. Thank you, Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates. I have the honor of speaking on behalf of the people of Kenya and the President of the President of the Republic of Kenya, Dr. William Samoei Ruto. We thank the General Assembly for establishing this global dialogue, the Secretary-General for convening an inclusive and diverse independent international scientific panel on AI. Our approach in this dialogue is practical. AI must expand opportunity and prosperity for all countries and must not deepen existing divides. That is the best way we apply to questions of inclusion, rights, risks, and interoperability. For many developing countries, the divide is felt in compute, data, and language. Compute power remains concentrated in a few countries, while many AI systems do not reflect African languages, data, or context. If this pattern continues, countries in the Global South will remain consumers of technologies that they did not shape while bearing risks and harms they did not create. This is why Kenya supports cooperation that moves from principle to implementation. We need affordable compute, open and representative datasets, safe and accessible models, stronger skills, and meaningful participation in standard settings, and we need fair financing for the regional infrastructure, research capacity, and public institutions that must govern and deploy AI safely, especially where it is used in public services and in decisions that affect people's rights. At home, our National AI Strategy 2030 builds on what already works at scale, The eCitizen platform now offers 22,000 government services to 13 million Kenyans. This year, we launched a government interoperability framework which connects public systems through a secure, trusted infrastructure. That experience clarifies our view that interoperability is not uniformity, but rather common baseline for safety. We are also investing in Kenya. Kenya is rolling a new— the new UNESCO and Oxford course on AI government with the goal of training 20,000 public officers by 2027. We are one of the 5 countries piloting AI and robotics education in schools in partnership with the ITU. In our view, This global dialogue should serve as a culmination of national, regional, and international conversation on AI, including the Internet Governance Forum, the AI Action Summits, standards dialogues, the African Union, and other regional processes. As a convergence— I thank the Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication, and Digital Economy of Kenia. We now wish a warm welcome to Carlos Mendoza Alvarado, the Secretary of Planning and Programming of the Presidency of Guatemala. A very good afternoon, distinguished co-chairs, distinguished heads of delegations, ladies and gentlemen. Guatemala values the launch of this global dialogue on AI governance as an opportunity to ensure that this technological transformation is oriented toward the welfare of all people rather than the deepening of already existing inequalities. As a developing country, we consider that artificial intelligence governance should combine ethical principles, human rights, scientific evidence that is independently verified, effective international cooperation, and concrete resources in order to bridge existing divides. Discussing risks and standards is not enough. We must also speak about capacity, connectivity, high-quality public data, digital infrastructure, AI literacy, and institutional strengthening, particularly for those countries that are facing structural difficulties. The particular contribution of Guatemala is born out of our own reality. We are a pluricultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country. And for this reason, a truly inclusive artificial intelligence cannot be limited to expanding access to technologies designed in other contexts. Cultural diversity and linguistic diversity need to be recognized. Progressively incorporating indigenous languages, respecting ancestral knowledge and community knowledge, and avoiding bias which would make peoples, their territories, and their different ways of knowledge invisible. From Guatemala, we would like to state this clearly: digital inclusion must also mean cultural inclusion, linguistic inclusion, and territorial inclusion. We therefore reiterate the value of multilateralism and international cooperation. We must actively participate in defining standards, frameworks, and mechanisms for global governance of AI. Our aspiration is clear. AI cannot be a border of exclusion. It must be a tool to build more able states, more solid democracies, more inclusive societies, and a truly shared digital future. Thank you. I thank the Secretary of Planning and Programming of the Presidency of Guatemala, and I now give the floor to the Minister of State for Technology and AI. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, today I'd like to extend the greetings of Lebanon. A long time ago, our ancestors, the Phoenicians, looked to the sea and used the sea not as an obstacle, but they saw it as a bridge, a bridge between civilizations that allowed the Phoenicians to exchange goods, cultures, and that exchange today has become our heritage, which is still in the minds of our people. And some concern to a future that holds the promise and the challenge of AI. Lebanon has known wars, crises, uncertainty, displacement, and loss. We've seen institutions destroyed and generations of young people forced to look beyond our shores for opportunity and safety. But Lebanon's story has always been, and still is, a story of renewal, rebuilding, and rejuvenation. To prepare Lebanon for the AI era, we are investing in Numu, a national digital and AI capacity-building program. This is a human-centric effort to expand access to digital and AI skills across the country. We have also revised the school curriculum to include in it responsible AI. We are building networks with the Lebanese abroad, the expatriates, our Lebanese diaspora. So they continue to mentor Lebanese youth who are innovating and open doors for them internationally. We're building the digital foundations of a modern state so institutions can move from paper to digital, from fragmentation to coordination, from delay to delivery. We are focusing on governance readiness, cyber readiness, and data readiness. We are also promoting homegrown innovation, and we're developing our digital and AI sovereignty. Not as isolation, but as capability and choice. The ability to understand the technologies we adopt, govern the data we generate, secure the systems we depend on, and shape AI in line with our values. We know that no country's AI future can be built within its own borders. Neither can one country alone fight off the nefarious effect of AI models gone wild. We need standards that can be implemented. We need safeguards that protect people without freezing innovation. Lebanon is ready for a purposeful dialogue. We bring the courage of those who've crossed uncharted seas, the resilience of those who have weathered storms, and the resolve to navigate a future shaped by AI. Thank you. I thank the Minister of State for Technology and AI of Lebanon, and now I give the floor to the Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the United Republic of Tanzania, Her Excellency Angela Kairuki. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, I have the honor of delivering these remarks on behalf of Her Excellency the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Dr. Samia Suluhu Hassan. Excellencies, distinguished delegates, artificial intelligence is reshaping our world at a very extraordinary speed. The central question that we need to address is not whether AI will transform our society, but how we ensure that this transformation is inclusive, interoperable, but also beneficial for all our citizens. Our national and regional experiences show that AI governance must be rooted in human-centered principles, strong digital foundations, but also cooperation across borders. Tanzania views artificial intelligence as a strategic enabler for achieving the aspirations of the Tanzania Development Vision 2050, but also our National Digital Economic Strategic Framework, and it also presents significant opportunities to transform our key sectors, including agriculture, healthcare, education, financial services, but also public administration. Tanzania is also advancing a people-centered digital transformation agenda that places responsible AI at its core. And in this regard, several initiatives have been implemented, including developing governance frameworks, including strengthening our data governance, privacy, and cybersecurity, so that we can build trust but also protect our citizens. But furthermore, we have developed our national guidelines for AI in education, but also the national AI policy framework for health sector, and many more. We have also expanded our national ICT broadband backbone, but also developed our national data infrastructure, DPI, so that we can ensure AI can scale equitably across across various sectors. At the regional level, Tanzania works very closely with ITU, with African Union, with ATU, with EAC, SADC, and other partners. We're doing all this to ensure that the AI systems can operate seamlessly across borders, supporting trade mobility, but also to share development goals while also respecting privacy, security, and national sovereignty. To conclude, developing countries must have an equal voice in shaping global AI policies, standards, and governance framework. Therefore, Tanzania calls for enhanced international cooperation in capacity building, technological transfer, research partnerships, innovation ecosystems, but also investment in digital infrastructure to ensure that all countries can participate meaningfully in global AI ecosystem. I thank you very much for your kind attention. I thank Her Excellency Angela Karuki, Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the United Republic of Tanzania. We have heard the last speaker for this morning session. The list of speakers that distinguished delegates have received will remain the same, and the session will resume in the high-level governmental segment taking place tomorrow. From 3:00 to 4:30 PM. I would like to remind you that national statements can be submitted via email to aidialogue.un.org. We now move to the high-level multi-stakeholder plenary segment. Today's session has been designed a little differently. Rather than beginning Starting with a moderated panel, we will first hear directly from participants in the room. And we would like to invite interventions representing different stakeholder groups and regions to share their perspectives on the opportunities, challenges, and priorities they see for advancing AI governance in practice. These interventions are intended to help frame the discussion. Our panelists will build on these perspectives during the moderated discussion that follows. Your Excellencies, distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen, the next session will be extended by 15 minutes and finish with a hard stop at 13:45. So anyone who is attending any side sessions with a start time of 1:30 PM, please make sure that you reach them on time as their start times have not been adjusted. At the end of this segment, the plenary room will be reconfigured, so we kindly ask you that as soon as the segment is over, that without stepping on anyone's toes and remembering to take all your belongings with you, you vacate the room as swiftly as possible. I will say that again, as swiftly as possible, as swiftly as possible at the end of this segment. Many thanks in advance. Thank you. Thank you. So just some housekeeping. So to take the floor, we invite you to raise your hand and an usher with an orange armband will provide you with a microphone. Or if you're seated at a table with a mic, please request for the floor using the mic button. Speaking time will be limited to 3 minutes for everyone. A timer has been set and is visible on the screens. So we kindly encourage all speakers to respect the allotted time so that the largest possible number of the speakers may be accommodated through this short, but we're pretty sure a very fruitful segment. To ensure fairness and allow full participation, mics will be automatically switched off once the allocated speaking time has expired. So we therefore respectfully request the speakers to please conclude the remarks within the prescribed time limits. I will be assisted by the Joint Secretariat for this short segment, and then we will follow with the program. With that, we are very, very pleased to open the floor. Joint Secretariat and those in charge of AV, can we request the house lights come on, please, so that the Joint Secretary may assist the co-chairs? We will need the house lights on, please. AV, can you control the lights? Next we have— yes, please, go ahead. We'll need a microphone this side, please. Yes, okay, please. Hello. Oh, yeah. Hi, thank you so much for the floor. My name is Luisa Franco Machado. I run a youth-led nonprofit called Equilabs, and I wanted to take the floor because I realized that safeguarding young people has become the dominant language in AI governance spaces, including this one. We debate age verification, we debate age-appropriate AI restrictions on access to social media and platforms. Much less common, however, is a genuine effort to understand how young people actually experience these technologies, how we feel about AI, and what kind of governance we're asking for and need to be part of creating. I wanted to ask so I can understand who's part of this space. If you're 30 years old or younger, can you stand up? Okay, hi. I feel like we're maybe 10 or 15, maybe a little bit more, a little bit less. So we're not many, right? Um, even if everybody tells us that we are the future of technology and the policies that you are debating are made for us. Well, as someone from Gen Z who has worked on AI governance from São Paulo to Berlin, I can tell you that many young people are not really excited about AI. We are increasingly skeptical of it. We are the generation learning what it means to depend on ChatGPT before trusting our own thinking. We're the generation questioning companies that celebrate AI while replacing human workers. We understand these technologies because we grow up inside them. Yet our response from this space has largely been to govern young people's relationship with technology rather than technology companies' relationship with power. Young people are becoming more vulnerable because public institutions have not been bold enough to govern the concentration of private power shaping our digital lives, while at the same time continuing to sign multimillion-dollar contracts that deepen their independence with the very companies they're expected to regulate. We already have the evidence, the testimonies, and the lived experience. If we're serious about safeguarding young people, we have to move beyond governing the symptoms for these inequalities and start governing the conditions that produce them. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. The next speaker, please, the one that has with the mic there. Perfect. Yes, please go ahead. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andras Szerenyi. I'm from the Global Cities Hub, an organization connecting local governments in the of international organizations, and I would like to intervene on the topic of who is governing AI and offer you a vision of more inclusive multilateralism. We commend the fact that the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance is taking place, and we applaud the panel and the report. However, we We see that local governments are not part of the discussion while we know that artificial intelligence, while are developed by companies and regulated by member states, are used and implemented at the local level. Our everyday life is more and more affected by AI and local and regional governments play an important role in how AI is used and how AI is implemented. Just to give you 3 very simple examples, when we are talking about the data used by AI government, we know that local and regional governments, we know that cities are producing most of the data now available, and it's not a question that this data has to be handled in a transparent way, has to be owned by the community, by the cities, by the nations, and not by private companies. The second example can be the environmental aspects. We heard from several ministers in, in the room that the different AI centers, data centers, will play a very important role. But we also know that these centers have an important environmental impact, and these impacts are local impacts, and these are local governments who have to face this one. And the third example would be the human rights aspect, which is also very important at the local level. So let me offer you 3 recommendations. First, the AI should not be deployed solely to maximize efficiency or technological performance. It should be improvement quality of life of the citizens. Second, the AI governance should be designed for resilience, not only optimization. Especially in urban environments, governance frameworks should strengthen the capacity of the public institutions. And last but not least, local and regional governments should be recognized as a distinct governance actor alongside national governments industry, academia, and civil society. They should become governors and not only implementers in that sphere. Thank you. Thank you. Not my intention— Yes, I will give you the floor. Just let me react very briefly. This dialogue, throughout the process, we tried to be as inclusive as possible. No one was set aside, excluded. Everyone had the opportunity to participate in the different sessions that we organized in person and online. And I hope that, as we— you know, this is only the first dialogue— that in the process towards the second, even more stakeholders will be able to engage. So rest assured, this will remain as inclusive as universal as possible, because this is also the nature of the United Nations. Thank you very much. Now, can I see who's the next one? Fantastic. Sir, you have the floor there. Can I have the usher? Thank you. Thank you. My name is Aziz Abakirov. I'm from the Kyrgyz Republic High Technology Park. Thank you, wonderful panel discussion and wonderful report. Of independence and, uh, worse, uh, hearing now from small nations. 7,000 languages, most of them invisible, uh, to AI. If a language is absent from the data, it is absent from the future. In Kyrgyz Republic, we decided to change that. The problem is AI is concentrated in the hands of a few large players, and the report is already mentioned about It. Small nations, small languages left behind. Our answer, Kani TTS, an open-source TTS model, 4 million parameters, runs on a standard laptop, trained in just 6 hours of 8 GPUs. Already supports 15+ languages— Kyrgyz, Arabic. We released the full pre-training code. Any team can adapt it for their own languages. The model is already trending on Hugging Face. This is not just a model, it is proof that world-class AI can be built in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic, Cairo, Santo Domingo. Building on this, we are launching Snap, Small Nations AI Powerhouses, an open global alliance where small nations pull data infrastructure and expertise. In the AI revolution, the size of your country doesn't matter. What matters is equality, unique data, and the will to collaborate. If you work in language technology, open data, or AI policy, let's connect. The greatest breakthrough of the AI era is not AI itself. It is humanity's ability to collaborate at a scale the world has never seen before. Join SNAP, Small Nation AI Powerhouses. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Now, can I have the author? Where is the next one? Fantastic. Go ahead. Son, go ahead. Good afternoon. Thank you for the amazing event today. My name is Kamlesh Lardi, and I am a, um, expert in business and technology transformation, and I've advised companies for close to 30 years in this space. And I specialize as well in cognitive governance for AI use in enterprises. Now, my team and I have conducted a neuroscience-based study, um, in a Swiss company recently where we measured the brain activity of people as they completed cognitive tasks in the workplace with and without AI. And some of the findings were incredibly revealing for us. For example, familiarity bias, where we saw over 500% increase in familiarity with AI output. What this means is, as LLMs are engineered and designed to appear competent as well as credible in terms of the output that they produce, people tend to trust those outputs more, and hence their vigilance and scrutiny of the outputs tends to reduce significantly. Also, with increase of AI literacy, we found that the likelihood of vigilance and governance over the AI output also reduces, and attention drift tends to occur as people start to use AI systems more, they do tend to trust the systems, and their attention reduces in terms of being aware of some of the mistakes or whether the output is credible. And this often happens without people actually being aware of it. So it appears in the brain data that we tracked. So, um, I appreciate the conversations that have occurred today and all the presentations on the various panels around what has been looked at in terms of AI governance. And there's been a lot of focus around technical governance, human governance, administrative process, as well as the risks and impact on society and enterprises, as well as industry. But cognitive governance is a crucial element as well for AI in terms of governance. And this is— should be an aspect or a layer that needs to to be looked at by the panel. And I feel that there is— at the moment, I have developed a cognitive governance framework for enterprises, but it should be an element that is developed at a broader level within an organization like this or within the panel like this where it could be applied broadly across industries and regions. And this should be— there should be a level of urgency for how this is developed because if we are relying on individuals, users, and people to be that last mile governance layer for AI application. The fact that artificial intelligence does shift the way humans think, make decisions. Thank you very much for that, and thank you so much for the interest of everyone. It's, it's really, really encouraging that conversation. That meant gentleman there. He will have the mic, and I'm sorry that we cannot accommodate more because we have also the panel, as you remember, and with that is the last activity of today. So please, sir, go ahead. Thank you. Flo Albu from the Children's Investment Fund Foundation. The report is right that access to AI does not produce equal benefit. I'd push on one word of it, which is ownership. When a health ministry in a low-income country runs a nutrition or diagnostics model, questions are: who owns that model? Who owns the data that it has learned from? And who can still run it when the grant that funded that has ended in a couple of years? If the answer is a foreign model on a foreign cloud, then what we have funded is access, not capability. And my question to the panel is, what obligations, if any, should sit on funders and vendors to make these systems locally owned and still running in 10 years rather than just for the duration of the project? Thank you. Thank you very much for all the participants for those really thoughtful interventions. Many, many thanks, and again, sorry we cannot accommodate more. So building on these contributions, we will now move to the second part of this session, a high-level moderated roundtable discussion featuring representatives from governments, industry, civil society, academia, the technical community, and international organizations. To begin this segment, I would like to invite our distinguished our distinguished moderator, Mr. Whitney Bird, President and CEO, United States Council for International Businesses, to the podium to introduce the panel and speakers for this session. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, we will now move on to the last session before lunch and as you've heard it's moderated by the President's and CEO of the United States Council for International Business, USCIB, Whitney Baird. Whitney Baird, thank you. The floor is yours. Sorry, I'm going to ask the panelists if we can stand very briefly for a family photo. Thank you. Thank you for the kind and warm introduction. I'd like to introduce the U.S. Council for International Business as a voice of U.S. business in the international arena. And our member companies provide solutions, innovations, and investments that are in indispensable to responding to global challenges. I'm very excited to be here to moderate the multi-stakeholder session of the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. I have really appreciated hearing from states and from civil society today. I think what is so clear with the promise and risks of AI development and AI implementation is that everyone everyone who has a stake in the process needs to be at the table. And with that, I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to be joined by an exceptional panel of experts. And they— if I can introduce them one by one. The first is His Excellency Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy from Nigeria. Minister Tijani. Our second panelist is Chaleesi Marwala, who's the rector and undersecretary general of the United Nations University. Our third panelist is Kate Khaled, who is the founder and CEO of Amini AI. Our fourth panelist is Raman Chaudhuri, who's the CEO and co-founder of Humane Intelligence. Raman. And our fifth is Yizheng, who is the Wu Youzheng Professor at the Gao Ling School of AI at the Renmin University of China. Welcome, Professor. I'm going to ask each of our panelists a question, and I, um, have asked them— I recognize that we are a bit over time and have a hard stop, so we'll ask each to, um, have their remarks go no more than 3 minutes. Um, Mr. Minister, let me start with you. Nigeria has been at the forefront of AI governance leadership and you also sit on the Africa AI Council. I would note that in my previous life with the U.S. Department of State, I have visited incubators in Abuja and with coders in Lagos, and I know what the vibrancy of that community is like in Nigeria. What are the key actions and enabling conditions needed to translate AI governance frameworks and aspirations into measurable outcomes, and where is greater collaboration most urgently needed? Thank you so much, Madam Chair. Let me start, of course, by appreciating the United Nations for putting together this inaugural gathering. I think the Secretary-General of ITU mentioned in your speech that this couldn't be at a better time, and the pace at which which is being done is one that shows strong, strong leadership, which I think is exactly what, what we need when we're talking about governance frameworks in, in artificial intelligence. The first step is that we need to be moving away from governance principles into practical systems, because AI is already something that we're living with every day. It's disrupting sectors complicating business opportunities for both small, medium, and large businesses. So I think as governments or leaders in general, the urgent demand for us to be able to ensure that the governance frameworks that we're putting in place are actually meaningful is for us to start to look inward. As much as we co-create some of these governance frameworks together, I think each country We need to have clear strategies on things like how do we adopt AI in our country and how do we go about measuring what we are also governing as well. So, I think it starts from strategy. I think there's also a strong element of the way we look at AI that is focused around capacity building as well. How do we ensure that the government officials that are responsible for implementing this framework, folks do have the understanding, and they can continuously be moving alongside development in this space as well. So building capacity, not just in terms of talents to build AI, but also capacity in the public sector, I think is extremely important in this space as well. But beyond that, I think I've always been a fan of saying, as much as we think through governance framework, we also need to think of the absorptive capacity for nations to actually put AI to good use. Because we can see all the development that we want to see in the world. In nations where connectivity is still not meaningful, you can see limitation as to how AI is applied and then the ability of people to even govern in the first place. In spaces where infrastructure is not available, you already limit the application And the ability to also build in context and as such then govern appropriately as well. I think in cases where you also don't have the capacity to develop, you know, where people just have to be consumers and they can't participate in development, you start to see the limitation as well. So for me, I think in practical sense, if we're going to make some of these changes, I think it starts with clear leadership. Both political leadership. I think the leaders must have a clear understanding of why this is important. There will be a need for trusted institutions, because you can't really have governance systems in place if people don't trust the institutions that will implement the governance framework. We obviously also need to think through carefully how we measure the impact of the framework that we adopt, whether it serves our purpose or not. And I think lastly is investment as well. Nations must prioritize investment in artificial intelligence, whether it's investment in compute or investment in talent. The same way we can articulate how much impact good connectivity will make to a nation is the same way we now need to articulate the benefit and the impact of investment in artificial intelligence on the bottom line of every country, because this is now the key driver for GDP in most countries, as we're seeing. So it's important that we prioritize investments as well. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Minister. I— I'm really taken by the use of the word trust. I think that's enormously important. Also, capacity building for the public sector, and of course, the issue of connectivity for those who remain not connected. And I know within the ITU and in the UN as a whole, that access has been a key priority. So Professor Marwala, you've worked across government, academia, and now the United Nations system. Looking globally, where do you see the biggest disconnect between AI governance discussions, and implementation? And what role should universities, scientific institutions, and international organizations play in helping countries build the knowledge, capacity, and institutions needed to govern AI effectively? No, thank you very much for joining this very distinguished panel. Where I see the biggest disconnect is what— and I will borrow from the financial world— is what I call AI governance arbitrage. You have governance models that are happening at the international level, you have governance models that are emerging from industry, you have governance models that are emerging from all our member states, and they are not coordinated. So somebody who is interested in data will go to a country where the regulations are not that strong. And the same goes for compute capability. So we need to find a mechanism in which we can be able to harmonize all this. I think what— the thing that we need to do is really to educate. We need to educate the people about data, about Algorithms, we tend to forget about algorithms themselves. We need to educate them about computing. We need to educate them about how AI can actually be applied in all the applications. And to be able to do that, we have to reassert the values that should underpin the governance models. And for us in the UN, we see the values emanate from the Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter. We also need to change the behavior of people, and I'm not talking about social engineering here, and I'm not even talking about behavioral psychology, but we need to change them, and I think we change them through education. We also need to develop mechanism to incentivize good behavior around around AI, especially companies, including companies. What are the mechanisms that make people respect some of these models that we have adopted? And we need to simplify and educate about policies and regulations and standards. I see Doreen is here. They are doing fantastic work on standards. But are we taking these standards to the classrooms so that when people are designing, learning about the designs of these things, they have the standards perspective? We also need to talk about how do we educate the legislators so that they can be able to craft legislations that make sense? I have read about the AI Act. AI Act. I'm interested to see what is happening in my own continent with regards to regulations, with laws around AI. And finally, there are many institutions that are pushing this forward. The ITU is one of them. Some of this— the United Nations system is another one. And you have all these institutions I think we need to be able to bring them together at the working level, and this forum is good to bring them together at the dialogue level, but we need to also go to the working level. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor. I'm really taken by your use of the term arbitration. Because I think seriously when you have fragmented and sometimes dis-coordinated governance mechanisms, it both decreases trust among users, but it also increases costs for practitioners and builders, companies and others. And there's really, there, again, what I hear again is the need need for education in the public sector, legislators, and executive branches to be able to effectively provide the kind of leadership. Romaine, I'm going to ask you this from the perspective of someone who is deeply involved in the discourse on responsible AI. What concrete steps can stakeholders take to ensure that all countries and communities communities can meaningfully participate in AI governance discussions and implementation efforts? Thank you, and thank you all for your attention. Um, and I appreciate that question because the power of artificial intelligence lies not in development but in evaluation. Because what greater power than the power to define what is good and bad and right and wrong? True AI sovereignty is a combination of good governance and domain expertise. And that would require you to cultivate something that you probably all have in spades, and that's human capital. Only humans can understand context. Only humans can actually define model performance because we understand and we should be part of how we want artificial intelligence to be used in the world. A few years ago, I started Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit nonprofit organization, and we conducted evaluations all around the world with thousands of people. Today, what I'm working on is Human Intelligence Public Benefit Corporation, which builds out infrastructure to enable better evaluations. A few years ago, the question was, how can people get involved? Today, the question is, how can that involvement scale? So, as every country invests in their AI stack, you think about creating expensive data centers, building expensive models, and hiring expensive talent. Often what is overlooked is the evaluations layer and the infrastructure needed to scale up individual perspectives into defining goodness of fit. Thank you. So what can policymakers do? First is creating independent evaluation bodies. The second is taking all of these standards for evaluation that are being built and operationalizing them from a regional and domain perspective. And then finally, linking these evaluations to procurement. In other words, no company or organization would be able to have a contract to build artificial intelligence for government and social sector unless they have met these requirements. All in all, this enables countries from moving away from being simply a recipient of the AI models being built in other places to directing the priorities of development. And in doing so, it shifts the power dynamic away from a few hegemonic entities and more into the hands of regular people whose lives are impacted by the technology. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate, and I, you know, the evaluation And again, is a way that you build trust and build certainty. And I think a very useful contribution. And thank you. So, Kate, your work focuses on ensuring AI is built with local context, data, and communities in mind. And from your experience, what practical approaches have been most effective in ensuring community communities are not simply consulted but become genuine partners in the design, deployment, and governance of AI systems? Thank you for the question, and it's a pleasure to be here. I think really that question underscores a philosophy, an operating philosophy that we've had, um, at AMINI, which is that consultation is not fit for purpose and that true sovereignty or sovereign partnerships requires local ownership. And I'll give you an example of how, through our work with governments across the Global South, we're able to achieve things— this through 3 very concrete things, using as an anchor our work with the government of Barbados. The first is that critical data has to stay in-country. In Barbados, we digitized millions of government records, every bilateral agreement, every cabinet paper dating back 28 2018, and that intelligent knowledge base lives in the country under Barbados jurisdiction on an infrastructure that the government controls. And that means that ministers and civil servants can tap into it, but critically, they can now access frontier model capabilities without having to ever send their most critical data outside of their border. Countries shouldn't have to pick between capability and control or independence. Then secondly, we've talked a lot about capacity. Capacity actually has to transfer. And every contract that we sign with a government, we make sure that a transfer obligation is built in. And we're not talking about a help desk or customer service. We actually talking about a team in-country, which is training data stewards within government, but also engineers on specific pillar of operations so that they can take care of the systems. And we usually do this over— the transfer over 2 to 3 years. And when a team is ready to own a function completely, Amini hands over the systems entirely. And the goal is for our role to narrow over time. And that for us, that sustainability for us is actually our true measure of success. Then thirdly, the community needs to be able to build on top of it. In Barbados, we open-sourced what we call ChatBeeBee, which is an AI assistant that's lowering the access to public services for citizens. And because it's open-sourced now, any Barbadian developers can build on top of that infrastructure. We're running training programs for local youth and data scientists. They can now not just use the system, but also contribute and add services, create new applications on top of it, which is bringing more and more of the local context into the system and in turn generating economic value locally. And for me, that's the deeper point, because the most effective approach is not bringing solutions and expecting them to work. It's actually bringing communities at the design stage and before every single line of code is returned or deployed, so that they can define the problem with you, they can define their use cases, their edge cases, and bring their lived experience and their local context in. And that's the difference between a community that has shaped what gets built. They don't just own the system, they're actually extending it. And I want to end by saying that local context in the Global South has always been our superpower. And right now, co-design alongside local partnership is what becomes true governance. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. And I just continue to hear such a strong theme of capacity building so that populations can own and benefit and really use, again, the promise that AI can bring. So, Yi, many ethical AI principles are already well established. Where do you think the greatest implementation What implementation gaps remain, and how can international scientific cooperation help translate ethical principles into practical governance mechanisms that can be adopted across diverse countries and contexts? Yeah, you're right. I think there would consensus on the AI ethical principles already, not only in the UNESCO Ethics of AI recommendation, but also about the writings in the Governing AI for Humanities report from my UN high-level advisory body members. Well, when we actually translate these, like, around 10 high-level ethical principles into technical details, we map them into 90 different finer considerations. And then for each and every of them, actually, we ask questions to language models. And you know what was really happening is that when we ask the language model about these questions, and then they got really good, like 98%. But when I populate all the questions, like one question to 100 different ways of asking the same question, What is the result? The result is that they only get 58%. What does that mean? That means application-level language models do not— does not pass even the world consensus. This is the real-world status at this point. Not only about ethics, let me also talk about safety. When we test, you know, uh, the common safety concerns, you know, the best one get like, uh, for adversarial attack, so that, um, to find the safety loopholes, they get like 60% of the time they will be attacked. This is the best one. The worst one is 40% of the time they will be attacked. What does that mean? That means application-level language model services for 50%, for 40% of the chance that they're providing very risky services. This is what's really been happening now. So I think as a scientist, we must just speak for the truth. It's not only about how do we technically dig into reality and to provide this evaluation. It's not only about technology. The way that provide, you know, groundings of these ethical principles also need people, not only scientists that need to speak for the truth, that need to be balanced, but also we need general public to raise the literacy. We need scientists to help the world and the general public to raise the level of understanding of the current status of AI. There's no magic. It's only a machine that process information but that don't really understand information. Not only about technology, not only about the people that in this stakeholders, but also about the platform. Let me end by saying, um, that when we wanted a more ethical and more safer AI, 5 years ago, we've been talking every question, each and every question that we discussed today, but none of the question has been solved within this 5 years. So what do we need? We also need a platform. I personally cannot find a better platform compared to the United Nations. When our UN advisory body on AI work, Antonio Guterres, says that UN has not much money, has not much people to help us, so many people were criticizing the United Nations to get to do a better job. But what I'm thinking is that then offer your help, offer your money, offer your people to create a platform that can help us. No other platforms that can gather together 193 member states all together to consider about these questions in a very serious way. And I hope the next 5 years we could partially solve the most important challenges. Thank you. Thank you. And I really— I think a strong call to action, but additionally, really appreciate the focus on the absolute critical need for humans to remain in, as they say, the chain of command. We do. And the skill of critical thinking that we don't just need engineers. In fact, we need philosophers, we need others who really can, um, approach this from the broadest possible perspective on how we deploy and how we use the information, um, and how we trust. And again, at the end of the day, we come back to trust. Voices from the general public. I like the argument from the Z generation that probably some of the application, we don't have to even have to build that. We should be very cautious what kind of AI are we bringing to the next generation. Thank you. Thank you. Um, we have a few minutes left, and what I would really like to do is come back to the panelists for a very brief reflection. In looking ahead, how can this UN Global Dialogue on AI help address the most pressing gaps in today's AI governance landscape? So, what is one concrete outcome you would like to see emerge from this platform over the coming year? And maybe just each person 2 minutes, and maybe we'll go in reverse order, and I will start with Yuyi. Well, if I may, I think There are two things we need to consider very seriously. I'm going to continue by saying AI ethics is not only about what we shouldn't do, but also what we should do. For the Sustainable Development Goals, it's only 50% of the goals that has been achieved, but we only have a very few years left. Can we use AI as an enabling technology to tackle the rest of the challenges in global sustainable development. This is something that we should do, we should do actually together. Let me also end by saying that for this dialogue, we need some outputs. I agree with you, and if we are talking about ethics and safety of AI, definitely development of AI really need red lines. Ethics and safety of AI is not a backlash of the development of AI. Actually, it helps. It helps you to find the directions of developing AI. When you're getting to the wrong direction and then you're getting a little bit to another way so that you keep a steady development, so then ethics and safety of AI will never hinder the process of AI development and application. It helps AI to develop in a healthy and steady way. Thank you. Maybe Romaine will come to you. Thank you so much. And thank you for the, for the wonderful question again. So there's a few things that I think I would like to see in the next year. You know, I think for all of us sitting on this panel and in this room at this point, we're on so many advisory groups, bodies, panels, and organizations that, you know, we, we often find ourselves cutting down the kind of engagement that we're doing and focusing on the ones that bring the most value. So what will bring the most value in the next year? In 2023, I wrote an op-ed for Wired where I said AI desperately needs global governance, and that has actually not changed. Has changed. But what I have seen is a global governance that's built on consolidating the people who are already powerful. These dialogues present an opportunity to maybe reset the direction that global governance has taken. So one is I would love to see a concrete direction in incorporating and engaging Global South and global majority countries. Again, you know, organizations like Kate's and mine have really focused on encouraging voices that are always the voices in the room. The second thing I'd like to see is a discussion of sovereignty, yes, but sovereignty that doesn't lose the concept of cooperation. We live in a time that's very geopolitically fraught between countries, between regions, and frankly, it feels like we're heading into an era where we're actually rolling back some of the international cooperative agreements that we've seen, not just across countries, but also within technologies. So while I, I significantly encourage sovereignty and ownership of the models and the modalities in which AI is built, I also want to ensure that we engage in international cooperation rather than closing doors to each other. Thank you. Thank you, Roman. Kate. I'm going to echo a little bit what has been said, and I think we need to— one of the outcomes I'd love to see over the next year is a place where we deconstruct and reconstruct the AI narrative, because for the past couple of years, that narrative has been singly driven from a very specific part of the world by very specific actors, and they've taught us that, or made us believe, that the only way to do AI is large-scale general-purpose models and large-scale gigawatt factories, which is not the case. And it's been a pleasure sitting through the outcomes and the evidence base of the panel that were shown this morning, because we are now hearing exactly what is going on, and we actually getting evidence of what is working or not on the ground. And I think we need more of those stories to be surfaced throughout the Global South and the global majority. And then the second thing I need— I think we need to support the companies who are trying and the builders who are trying in their own countries to push that agenda and help their countries develop themselves and look at AI in a different way. Give them a platform to surface their innovation, support them on being on stages like this one, because they're the ones who will be the guardians of what AI comes over the next couple of years, and it's not just going to be the people in this room, it is going to be the developers, the communities on the ground, and they have to be part of the conversation. Thank you. Professor. Thank you very much. If there is just one thing that I would like to see is to move from talk to action. We really have been talking quite a great deal of taking the technology to the Global South, democratizing access to the technology, but there has to be action, concrete action that requires all of us to come together. The second issue that I really think is important in moving from talk to action is that governance is really about a balancing problem. Professor Yi was talking about risk aversion. It's really about a balance between opportunity seeking and risk aversion, and where that balance should be is not very clear. It depends on many, many values that are varying. And I think if we could be able to be helped to find the right balance, and there are many places where this balance is necessary. Transparency versus security. If we have to make AI explainable and transparent, it comes at the expense of security. Where is the balance? Who determines it? Another one which was also mentioned earlier, there's quite a great deal of AI that is being trained using synthetic data. What is the balance? Where do we draw the line between the use of synthetic data versus the use of authentic data? And who determines that? Whether— and then there's the issue of truth. Truth is a very controversial subject in AI. If you go to an AI course, nobody talks about truth. They talk about accuracy. And the reason why they talk about accuracy is because the dominant version of AI, which is based on backpropagation, assumes that you can differentiate a function. And if you can differentiate a function, it can't be discrete. Like truth. And that is why, as long as we do not find a new paradigm, then we are always going to be talking about this issue. We need to invest in new paradigms to deal with algorithmic limitations of AI. Thank you. Thank you. Minister Tidjani, the last word to you. Thank you so much for Thank you for giving me the opportunity to chime in last. I think on this one, for me, it will be one thing which I'll frame around inclusion. And I know that inclusion can manifest itself in many ways, but for me, it will be inclusion when it comes to access to the benefits of artificial intelligence. And I think we need to be clear that access will not come only from just merely adopting WASP built elsewhere. We need to ensure that nations have access to capabilities, particularly infrastructure, that will allow them to be able to build for context. And I think that context is what I believe will drive the benefits that we want to see countries make from access to AI. And this platform is one platform that can help bring clarity to that, whether we're talking about clarity on access to shared compute, for instance, within regions, amongst closer countries, or beyond. Or we're talking about how we deepen, uh, what I mentioned earlier, the critical prerequisite for nations to use AI. Because I think we're not talking enough about the fact that there are prerequisites, uh, there are things that must be in place for nations to truly appropriate AI. And if we don't invest in that if we don't find ways to drive investment and support for this infrastructure, the gap that we're going to see with artificial intelligence will be bigger than what we were battling with when we were talking about the emergence of internet. This is going to be bigger because you have those who have access to AI and have used it more diligently and those who don't have access just because the infrastructure is not there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you everyone for joining us today for our first moderated panel of the day and to all of our speakers. I think today's conversation has reinforced that AI governance cannot be achieved by any single stakeholder or country, and progress will depend on sustained collaboration across governments, industry, industry, academia, civil society, and the international community. So thank you all, and I hand the program back to our master of ceremonies as I believe we break for lunch. Thank you so much. Thank you very much indeed, Whitney, for expertly guiding this discussion, and we would also like to express our sincere appreciation to you and all the distinguished panelists for for sharing their perspectives, experiences, insights, and to all the participants who contributed from the floor. Thank you very much indeed, everybody. So if you could please take note of the previous information that was to please clear the room as quickly as possible. We are going to be reformatting this room, so take your belongings with you. Unlike the aeroplane, please take everything with you and please stand up right now and leave the room so that they could reconstruct it again, uh, which will be rooms A, B, and C. And we wish you a very good lunch. Thank you.