Days prior to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence released its preliminary report positioned as the ground on which global discussions on AI governance rest.

 

Upon reading the report, we can safely say that calling it a disappointment is an understatement. Whilst the report has gathered damning evidence of extensive accumulation of capital in the AI market, it refuses to land on a conclusion with teeth, but rather retreats into technocratic, market-friendly remedies that leave the architecture of power and greed intact.

 

The report promises an ‘evidence-based assessment’ that is ‘policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive.’ Instead of asking whether products built to extract attention, labour, data, and natural resources should exist in their current form at all, the report turns to training programmes, literacy campaigns, age verification, and impact assessments. It names the harms in generous detail, yet refuses to name who profits.

 

As we stress in the statement, ‘the problem was never a lack of evidence, but a lack of political will.’

 

We call on the UN and the Scientific Panel to stop treating Big Tech as partners for change and start treating it as a concentration of power that must be constrained. If the Panel is serious about the evidence it has gathered, it must name Big Tech corporations’ ownership and business model as the central finding of the report.

 

Read the full statement here.