Salesforce's Marc Benioff and Rwanda's Paul Kagame will co-chair a UN-backed body that pulls the people building advanced AI into the same room as the politicians trying to govern it.
GENEVA: The United Nations is putting some of the most powerful figures in technology and government into a single room to work out shared rules for artificial intelligence. A new UN-backed body called the AI for Good Global Commission will seat tech chief executives alongside sitting heads of state, and it holds its first meeting on July 8 in Geneva, according to an announcement first reported by Axios.
The commission is being convened by the UN together with its International Telecommunication Union, the agency responsible for digital technology across the world body. Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff and Rwandan President Paul Kagame will co-chair it.
The lineup is unusual.
Who is at the table
The choice of co-chairs signals the balance the UN is trying to strike. Benioff runs one of the world's largest enterprise software companies and has been a loud voice in debates over technology and ethics. Kagame has spent years positioning Rwanda as a proving ground for digital development and is among the more prominent African leaders in global technology forums. Putting a Silicon Valley chief executive next to an African head of state is the commission's way of saying the conversation cannot belong only to the countries that already dominate the technology.
On the government side, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the ITU's secretary-general, and Estonian President Alar Karis are members, joined by AI and technology policymakers from Kazakhstan, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Nigeria. The spread reaches deliberately across wealthy and developing economies.
The corporate roster reads like a directory of the AI industry's biggest names. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy is on it, as are Microsoft president Brad Smith and Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang. Two of the newer AI companies are represented by their co-founders, Jack Clark of Anthropic and Aidan Gomez of Cohere.
That mix is the whole point. The UN is betting that the executives writing the code and the leaders writing the laws will produce better rules by talking to each other directly than by working apart.
Benioff frames it around values
Benioff, who will help steer the group, cast the effort in sweeping terms. "AI is the most profound technological transition in history," he told Axios, adding that human values have to guide every step because responsibility sits at the core of AI ethics.
He described the commission as a way to bring together the people who build these systems, deploy them, write the policy around them, and speak for the communities they affect. The goal, in his telling, is to get those groups moving together rather than pulling in opposite directions.
What the first meeting will tackle
The inaugural session is set to focus on a short list of areas where the group believes it can make progress as a bloc.
One is strengthening the infrastructure that AI depends on, the computing power and networks that decide who can build and run advanced systems. Another is speeding up the technology's use in areas with direct human stakes, among them health, education, food security, and disaster response. A third is keeping trust and safety at the heart of how these tools are deployed.
Those are broad ambitions. Turning them into concrete commitments is where the commission's real test begins.
Why the UN is doing this now
Global AI regulation is pulling apart rather than together. Some governments favor strict, binding rules, while others prefer a lighter touch. A growing number now treat AI capacity as a question of sovereignty, something to build and control at home rather than import. The result is a patchwork that makes cross-border coordination difficult, and the commission is an attempt to bridge it by linking the industry building advanced AI with the politicians responsible for governing it.
The timing is not accidental. The commission's debut lands in the middle of a dense week of AI diplomacy in Geneva. The inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance runs on July 6 and 7, the ITU's AI for Good Global Summit follows from July 7 to 10, and the WSIS Forum unfolds across the same days. Together they turn the city into the temporary capital of global technology policy.
The ITU itself gives the effort institutional weight. Founded in 1865 and now counting 194 member states, it is the UN's oldest agency and its point of contact for digital technology. Last year's AI for Good Summit and the connected WSIS events drew more than 11,000 participants from 169 countries, including ministers from 100 governments, over half of them from the developing world.
Agreement will not come easily
Here the skepticism sets in.
World governments remain far apart on how AI should be regulated, even where many of them agree in principle that democratic values ought to shape it. Reaching cohesive goals that survive contact with national politics and rising demands for digital sovereignty will be hard for a group this varied.
The language of "responsible AI solutions" plays well in a Geneva conference hall. It is harder to enforce inside individual companies competing for market share, and harder still across countries whose rules already point in different directions. A commission like this has no power to compel anyone. Its influence comes from convening, from the pressure of putting rivals and governments at one table and asking them to commit in public.
The connectivity goal may be the winnable one
The commission's most achievable target may be the least glamorous: getting AI, and the internet it rides on, to people who currently have neither.
By the ITU's own count, 2.2 billion people remain offline, most of them in low- and middle-income countries. That is roughly a quarter of humanity shut out of the digital economy before the question of AI even arises.
The divide runs along other lines too. Women are less likely to be online than men, and people in rural areas far less likely than those in cities, so the people missing out tend to be the same ones already on the margins.
That gap is where the commission's ambitions meet the hardest numbers. The ITU reports that 96 percent of those still offline live in low- and middle-income countries, and that in low-income nations only about 23 percent of people use the internet, against 94 percent in high-income ones. Closing that distance is a problem the commission's blend of corporate resources and political weight is well suited to take on, and it is the one goal on its agenda that does not first require the world's governments to agree on how AI should be policed.
