Nearly 200 Nations Step Through the Door Towards AI Governance

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Round-Up for the Week of July 6-10, 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the news of late, and stakeholders around the world weighed in this week. The United Nations (UN) convened an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI to assess how AI is transforming lives globally. The panel's recently released Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI details the UN's evidence-based assessment of the opportunities, risks, and impacts of AI, and was followed by the first-ever Global Dialogue on AI Governance, held by the UN. This flurry of discourse, moderated and encouraged by the UN, signals a growing need for global coordination on AI governance and for enhanced understanding of the dynamics at play within the existing AI ecosystem.

Here's what we've been watching as the UN's AI directives unfolded this past week.

Remarks from UN Secretary-General António Guterres

In a press conference announcing the preliminary findings of the panel, UN Secretary-General António Guterres outlined the mission of this initiative:

"The Panel is intended to help the world separate fact from fakes, and science from slop," said Secretary-General Guterres. "We are looking to them to provide an authoritative reference, a reference point at a moment when a reliable, unbiased understanding of AI has never been more critical."

Secretary-General Guterres stressed the importance of having research be open to all, so nations around the world can have equal access to guidance on AI and awareness of its potential—and its risks. He urged nations to act today to establish guidelines for AI and to better understand its advancement.

Findings of the UN's Preliminary Report

The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI serves as the first global scientific body on AI, operating under a strictly scientific, non-political mandate to document international scientific consensus and disagreements while remaining policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive. The panel's Preliminary Report is the first of its kind and will be updated progressively throughout the year, with thematic briefs addressing developments as they arise. According to the UN, the report reflects the best available evidence in a field moving so rapidly that any snapshot requires a commitment to revision.

The UN seeks to present a balanced analysis of the risks and opportunities of AI with "a commitment to evaluating empirical data without undue bias towards optimism or pessimism." The UN acknowledges that AI has numerous benefits and drawbacks, but does not seek to address all of them; it merely focuses on those it has determined to be the most pressing.

AI capabilities and adoption

Recent years have seen rapid, and in some areas accelerating, progress in a range of AI capabilities. Significant investments in computing power, new AI methodologies, and specialized training data have led to sustained improvements in a wide range of AI capabilities. These include fluent conversation, functional code generation, expert- level reasoning in mathematics and science, large-scale data analysis, and the generation of image, audio, and video content. Limitations remain, such as reliability, strong performance across human languages and cultures, interaction with physical systems, execution of complex or multi-step projects, and production of factual outputs.

These gains have unlocked useful applications across science, health, agriculture, accessibility, knowledge work, and information technology, including in the development of AI itself. 

AI adoption has accelerated broadly and unevenly across countries and sectors. Globally, over a billion people now use conversational AI weekly. Yet AI access and use vary widely globally, with adoption in the global South lagging far behind that in the global North. Furthermore, there are significant differences in compute infrastructure and models between advanced economies. This disparity reflects, and may even reinforce, existing inequalities. AI development itself is even more concentrated: according to recent estimates, the United States of America accounts for 75 percent of the computing power among the world’s top 500 AI supercomputers, with China accounting for 15 percent. Companies in the United States and China also develop almost all leading general-purpose models, and a small number of countries control critical inputs for the supply chain of AI computer chips.

While the shift towards AI agents is underway, their future adoption and economic impacts will likely be shaped by continued improvements in their ability to accomplish knowledge work with little or no human oversight. An AI agent is a computer system that can plan and autonomously act towards achieving goals, using the tools at its disposal. These systems have been improving rapidly in recent years, with one study finding that the length of certain software tasks that leading systems can accomplish has been doubling every four to seven months. If this rate of improvement continues, AI agents will soon complete tasks that currently take human programmers days or weeks. Because they can work with little oversight and at a rapid speed, AI agents may lead to significant economic and scientific benefits.

Understanding and managing risks

AI development entails risks, with potential negative impacts on human rights, social systems, and the environment. Sycophantic AI behaviour, where AI responses reinforce users’ existing beliefs regardless of accuracy, has been linked to several severe mental health incidents, including documented deaths. AI makes it easier to produce and target persuasive content at scale, including content designed to mislead, contributing to a gradual erosion of information integrity that can weaken the shared reality required for public trust, social cohesion, and democratic deliberation. Criminals and bad actors have been documented using AI systems to assist in cyberattacks. Many of these harms fall disproportionately on already disadvantaged populations.

Looking ahead, the gap between rapidly improving capabilities and effective risk management methods may lead to catastrophic outcomes. Reliable methods for retaining control over highly autonomous AI systems are lacking. There is no scientific guarantee that AI agents will not violate instructions, and evidence is accumulating of cases in which they already do. Such behavior may pose challenges to evaluation and oversight methods, as the ability of leading AI systems to recognize testing environments and produce misleading evaluation results that would favour their continued operation grows. Additionally, novel risks may arise from interactions between multiple agents.

AI risks are unevenly distributed across populations and countries, while AI development and the wealth it creates are highly concentrated. The concentration of AI capabilities in a small number of firms and countries could enable authoritarian capture and undermine democratic accountability.

Governing artificial intelligence to unlock benefits and mitigate risks

Realizing the full benefits of AI while minimizing its risks requires good governance. Economic and labor gains and their equitable distribution are not automatic: with complementary investments in skills, workflows, infrastructure, and labor-market institutions, technology can create new jobs that do not exist right now—over 60 percent of jobs in 2018 compared to 1945 are new. Without these investments, AI risks widening inequality, displacing workers, and shifting wealth from labor to capital rather than creating sustainable good jobs—those with fair compensation, worker autonomy, and a reliable path to social dignity. AI can profoundly expand human capabilities through personalized education, accessible mental health tools, and improved assistive technologies, but realizing these opportunities safely requires dedicated investments and policies to incentivize equitable access and reward innovation, while preventing the exploitation of vulnerable populations, particularly children, and avoiding displacement of expertise, psychological dependency or cultural and linguistic erasure.

Policymakers seeking to shape this governance face an evidence dilemma: they need evidence to make informed, consequential governance decisions, but by the time the evidence exists, it might be too late to act, as it lags behind the pace of AI development.

The capacity to act on existing evidence of AI risks and impacts is unevenly distributed. Most countries, including many advanced economies, lack the technical expertise to assess the most capable “frontier” models or to participate meaningfully in their governance. Compute infrastructure, evaluation expertise, and data (e.g., to cover different languages) are concentrated where AI is built, leaving most countries dependent on systems they cannot build, inspect, audit, or fully adapt to local context.

Concrete next steps to close the above gaps exist, but each requires sustained investment to shape, evaluate, and deploy AI. 

The UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance

To help steward global, collective action on AI governance, the UN convened the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance on July 6-7. The inaugural session sought to ensure that governance reflects the priorities of all nations, not just the most technologically advanced, and that the benefits of AI are shared by all.

Discussions addressed various themes, including the opportunities and implications of AI, how to bridge the AI divide, international cooperation on AI governance, and robust human oversight of AI systems—consistent with international law—to ensure safety and security.

Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly, said about the event:

Baerbock's remarks aligned with many of the conversations held over the two-day event. A key theme of discussions was dispersed AI innovation, enabling a broader landscape of AI development and greater involvement from countries around the world, rather than the current concentration in a handful of countries.

Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy at the African Union H.E. Lerato Mataboge said about the African continent's AI ecosystem:

"There is a really strong appetite from the continent to not lose the opportunity and the window for becoming a part of the AI trajectory and agenda...Our real opportunity as a continent does not lie in us being individual markets, but really having a continent-wide AI ecosystem, where we collaborate and where we enhance each other's capability at scale."

As political power and capital continue to flow to large world powers, the growing AI market only exacerbates that divide. The UN's 2026 World Investment Report found that overseas investment by businesses rose again in 2025, but is increasingly steered by governments toward a small number of strategic sectors—like AI—as geopolitical rivalries intensify. The Wall Street Journal reports that this trend marks a shift away from investments driven by cost and efficiency considerations, a move that threatens to sideline many developing economies that don’t have the resources to compete with the inducements offered by their richer counterparts. The UN said that this new focus on strategic sectors, along with the use of subsidies and other incentives by those with deep pockets, will exclude many countries from an established path to higher incomes.

A New Coalition Around Children's Rights and AI

During the Global Dialogue event, a new coalition launched to make sure children's safety and rights are not an afterthought as artificial intelligence reshapes how they learn, play and grow up. The Coalition for Children’s Rights and Protection in the Age of Artificial Intelligence brings together governments, UN agencies, tech companies, civil society groups, educators, and child welfare experts. Its founding UN members are the Department of Global Communications (DGC), the UN human rights office (OHCHR), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization  (UNESCO). Seventeen countries have signed on so far—Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, France, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Morocco, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, and Spain. 

The launch follows Secretary-General Guterres' call for an AI Child Safety Pledge, made in his opening remarks to the Global Dialogue on AI:

Guterres' final message for the world on AI was that we are running out of time to establish a collaborative, global approach to AI governance—but it is not too late.

In addition to the Global Dialogue on AI, the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is hosting the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. The Summit, which brings stakeholders together to harness AI’s potential to solve global challenges, ends today.

Quick Bits

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• Majority of Americans support banning social media for kids under 16

Weekend Reads

• Alt Funding Field Guide
• Broadband in America Fixed Broadband Competition Focus Report – June 2026 Edition

ICYMI from Benton

• Don’t Be Fooled: When low-income households drop service, it is not because they don’t want it or because the market is rosy
• Agreed, But Not Done: The Broadband To-Do List Federal Agencies Keep Not Finishing
• Starlink: What It Is, How It Works, and What We Should Do About It
• Which Communities Go Dark in a Storm?

Upcoming Events

Jul 15-16—IP Transition Workshop (Federal Communications Commission)

Jul 15—From Silicon to Signal: America’s First All-AI 6G Wireless Stack (AEI)

Jul 16—The Future of E-Rate: Inside the FCC's Proposal and How to Make Your Voice Heard (Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition)

Jul 22—July 2026 Open Federal Communications Commission Meeting (Federal Communications Commission)

Jul 29—Protecting Schools and Libraries: The Cybersecurity Pilot Program and the Road Ahead (Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition)

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