Ian Bremmer
NEW YORK – Multilateralism has fallen on hard times lately, especially at the United Nations. The U.N. Security Council couldn’t stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon remain elusive, and subsequent COP summits have failed to spur enough concrete action to meet global climate targets. Not only are the U.N.’s own Sustainable Development Goals off-track; in many cases, progress toward meeting them has reversed. The U.N.’s foundational commitments to peace, security, and cooperation feel very foreign at a time when multiple wars are raging, protectionism is on the rise, and the world is splitting into rival blocs.
But despite this geopolitical recession, global cooperation is still possible. The U.N. General Assembly’s first Summit of the Future on September 22-23 tested the organization’s ability to tackle one of the world’s biggest transnational challenges: artificial intelligence. Surprising as it may be, the UN passed.
It is no exaggeration to say that AI has spurred one of the fastest and most robust policy responses in living memory. Barely a year ago, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres invited representatives from government, the private sector, and civil society to recommend how the world might govern AI in the service of humanity. He knew that the world’s ambition to govern AI could fall flat, much like the initial response to climate change. The existing approaches were already too fragmented, and most left out the Global South, with 118 countries party to no AI governance framework at all.
Together, we served as rapporteurs for the........