UN shifts AI governance from treaties to ITU standards work

The interesting thing about the 2026 AI for Good Global Summit at Geneva's Palexpo wasn't the flagship announcement, it was the quiet concession baked into how the announcement was framed. Tech Policy Press reports that ITU secretary-general Doreen Bogdan-Martin unveiled a new AI for Good Global Commission of 40-plus members alongside Rwandan president Paul Kagame and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, with executives from Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft and ZTE on the roster. Neither the US nor Chinese governments joined as members. Annalena Baerbock, president of the 80th UN General Assembly session, was blunt about the ceiling on ambition, saying the UN is always the sum of 193 member states and finding agreement is almost impossible.

That framing matters because it signals where the real work is heading. Deputy ITU secretary-general Tomas Lamanauskas conceded that genuinely binding global frameworks are essentially unachievable in the current political climate, and Bilel Jamoussi, deputy director of the ITU standardization bureau, described standards as a domain where consensus has proven elusive but potentially achievable. The concrete evidence is ITU recommendation F.748.44, adopted in March 2025, which established a first international standard for benchmarking foundation models, plus new focus groups on embodied AI, hosted in Hangzhou, and on AI agent identity verification. If you want to know where AI governance is actually being negotiated, the answer in this piece is technical standards bodies, not treaties.

The honest caveat is who's not in the room. Civil society and academics were excluded from the commission despite an open letter of protest, and Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics argued that civil society groups working with marginalized populations are quickest to hear the voices of those affected by AI uses and abuses. Giulio Coppi of Access Now went further, saying the summit spent the week listening to what the industry say 'good' means. The Broadband Commission, the closest analogue, was set up in 2010 and still leaves a quarter of the world's population disconnected after 15 years. What the reporting doesn't give you is which governments will actually adopt the new ITU standards domestically, or whether the commission will add civil society seats in response to the pressure. The forward-looking read is that firms and middle-power states that engage the ITU tracks now will shape the defaults everyone else inherits later.