Washington and Beijing Leave the U.N. Chasing AI’s Fast-Moving Rules
Washington and Beijing Leave the U.N. Chasing AI’s Fast-Moving Rules
As artificial intelligence alarms intensified — from disinformation and discrimination to cyberattacks and systems that could evade human control — the United Nations convened governments to debate international digital cooperation. Its agenda ranged from AI’s economic disruption to possible governance frameworks.
But the week’s political gravity lay elsewhere. President Xi Jinping was expected in Washington for talks with President Trump, while the two countries remained locked in disputes over intellectual property, Chinese access to advanced chips and the wider race to build the most powerful AI systems.
That contrast sharpened the central divide. António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, has cast AI as one of humanity’s existential risks and urged states to agree on safe, secure and responsible development. “The world cannot afford a race to the bottom on A.I. safety,” he said.
Yet analysts described a governance contest in which the U.N. is struggling to keep pace with the two powers that possess the most leverage. “Frankly, the U.N. has been sidelined in the A.I. conversation,” said Kai-Fu Lee of the Brookings Institution. “It’s a two-player game.”
The imbalance was visible on Sunday, when Washington and Beijing discussed creating a notification mechanism for national-security risks from AI, to be called the U.S.-China AI Dialogue. Then, on Monday, leaders from 22 countries adopted a declaration seeking stronger “human direction, oversight and control” of AI systems — without either the United States or China signing it.
The U.N. is not abandoning the field. It has built an advisory body and continues to press for consensus. But its more realistic role may be protecting countries without frontier models or vast data centers from being excluded from AI’s benefits. As legal scholar Julian Ku put it, the institution “can’t directly sway the actions of those with power, but it does represent the interests of others who don’t have that power.”
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