During the first session of the United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance held last week in Geneva, significant concerns emerged regarding the concentration of AI power in a handful of countries and corporations, and the resulting trust deficit that undermines inclusive AI governance. Secretary-General António Guterres underscored how this concentration excludes many nations, particularly developing countries, from decisions shaping their technological futures, embedding inequality in AI systems by design.
What Happened
The inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance took place in Geneva, Switzerland, in early July 2026, marking a key multilateral step in coordinating international AI policies. The meeting coincided with the release of a preliminary report from the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, which outlined critical challenges in evidence gaps and governance capacity worldwide. The Dialogue aimed to advance global AI governance beyond ethical principles toward practical implementation and institutional deployment.
Key Facts
The Dialogue highlighted the imbalance where most of the computing power, data, and AI talent are concentrated in a few countries, primarily the United States and China. According to the Scientific Panel’s report, in 2025, 91% of notable AI models originated from the private sector, with 59 developed in the US, 35 in China, and only 13 in other nations combined. Furthermore, 118 countries, mostly in the Global South, remain largely outside major AI governance discussions, and less than a third of developing countries have adopted national AI strategies. The report also emphasized that AI evaluation infrastructure is concentrated around English-language, high-income contexts, limiting representation in global policymaking.
What This Means
This dialogue reveals a profound trust deficit rooted in structural inequalities that hinder broad-based participation in AI governance. Communities that experience digital exclusion are often treated as passive recipients of AI policies, rather than active partners or co-creators of governance frameworks. As the research from Brazil’s quilombola communities and U.S. marginalized regions shows, local trust networks—comprising community leaders, educators, and health workers—play an essential role in mediating technology’s impact. Without recognizing and investing in these territorial trust infrastructures, policies risk further alienating the populations most affected by AI’s risks and benefits.
Additionally, the absence of trusted intermediaries contributes to misinformation and disinformation challenges that can threaten community cohesion and political legitimacy, as illustrated by cases from quilombola leaders facing hostile false narratives. These dynamics emphasize that effective AI governance must extend beyond technology design to address social and cultural contexts, empowering locally trusted actors as fundamental participants in digital policy implementation.
Background
The Dialogue builds on earlier research and policy efforts highlighting digital inequities, such as reports by Public Knowledge and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance documenting digital exclusion in U.S. communities, and Brazil’s Territórios Digitais project studying quilombola and Indigenous territories. These initiatives consistently reveal the failure of top-down digital policies to engage with existing community trust ecosystems, producing participation opportunities that are often superficial and exclusionary.
Analysis
Scholars like J. Nathan Matias and Megan Price, who inspired the Participatory AI Research Network, advocate for collaborative approaches where communities, journalists, and researchers co-produce evidence on AI’s societal impact. Such participatory methodologies aim to improve not just democratic legitimacy but the quality and reliability of AI evaluations themselves. The UN’s Scientific Panel also recognizes that AI governance capacity is strikingly absent in many regions and that long-term social consequences of AI use, such as erosion of social cohesion and political participation, remain poorly understood.
What Comes Next
The Dialogue’s outcomes call for permanent investment in sociotechnical mediation—such as community navigators and territorial articulators—to serve as a public good within AI governance frameworks. Future steps include expanding Latin American territorial methodologies into international conversations and supporting territorial research as primary evidence for policymaking. The Scientific Panel’s forthcoming full report is expected to provide further guidance on these implementation priorities.
Sources
This article is based on reporting and publicly available information from the following sources:
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