I flew into New York from my home in Manila for a little more than 24 hours. I landed near midnight on Friday, June 19, and finished writing my speech around 3 am. It was the first time we were doing anything like this: briefing member states of the United Nations about the status of the preliminary report on the technology that’s turning our world upside down. 

By 9am, I was with my co-chair, Turing awardee Yoshua Bengio, and an hour later, we were taking questions from the governments of the world until one in the afternoon. We gave them a preview of what we had written, which we hand over to the Global Dialogue in Geneva in July. Then meetings inside the building until three, and a few hours later, I was on my way back to the airport. 

Here’s why this is worth the trip.

Last year, the General Assembly created something unique: a standing, independent, scientific body on artificial intelligence. A panel of 40 experts with a mandate, a timeline, and accountability to evidence rather than to politics or profit. 

First to speak was Annalena Baerbock, president of the 80th UN General Assembly, the body that willed this panel into being.

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The stakes are high.

AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes, and it is moving faster than any society has been able to adapt to. The power to build and control it sits with a handful of companies and a handful of governments. It’s already rewriting what we read, what we believe, who we trust — the shared reality that democracy depends on.

I’ve long questioned whether we still have agency: nearly three-quarters of the world today have elected illiberal leaders democratically — insidiously manipulated by information and narrative warfare exploiting the design of social media. It’s significantly worse with chatbots and agentic and multi-agentic AI. We’re living through an information armageddon, I told the UN General Assembly last September.

What makes this panel different is independence. It answers to no company and no country. That independence was fought for — and that is the reason the report can be trusted. It is also, as I told the Assembly, the hardest thing we have had to protect. 

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Over three hours, four negotiating groups and 31 states took the floor to give their statements and ask us questions — Uruguay for the Group of 77, Saint Kitts and Nevis for the Caribbean Community, Saudi Arabia for the Arab Group, and the European Union, speaking for much of the planet between them. Then the individual states, from every region and across every divide you can name: Brazil, India, China, the Russian Federation, Iran, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and the Holy See among them. 

Governments that agree on almost nothing in this building engaged, and in listening to their concerns and questions, we found common ground between risks and opportunities. 

The questions came back to the same place, again and again — the one the developing world has been asking longest. From Uruguay to Uganda, from the Caribbean to South and Southeast Asia, state after state pressed it: AI cannot become one more divide, one more technology the many depend on and the few control. They asked how to close the gap in compute, infrastructure, and access — how to be active participants, in India’s words, not only consumers. They asked us to hold the line on independence, and to be honest about both risk and opportunity.  

We don’t write the policy; that is for the governments in that room. But that was the challenge I left them with: 40 of us, from every divide you can name, found common ground in the science. If we could do it, so can you. – Rappler.com