The Global Dialogue on AI Governance is the United Nations’ first universal platform for discussing AI governance worldwide. With the international community currently lacking coherent mechanisms to govern AI’s rapid development, and many countries experiencing a disproportionate distribution of opportunities and harms, the Dialogue comes at a critical moment, offering stakeholders an opportunity to respond to AI’s social, economic, and geopolitical impacts. 

Established by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution in August 2025 and mandated by the Global Digital Compact, its inaugural session will convene on 6–7 July 2026 in Geneva.

While the Dialogue is not a regulatory body and doesn’t have a mandate to make binding decisions, it focuses instead on offering a political space to build shared understanding. Like the Internet Governance Forum, the Dialogue has global agenda-setting power, and, through UN mechanisms, offers a platform to develop AI governance norms. These non-binding norms allow states to agree on basic, common-sense principles and shared expectations for state behaviour. If we are fortunate to reach consensus, the UN sessions may also yield resolutions.

Stakeholders hope the Dialogue will address a spectrum of urgent problems, including the fragmentation of AI governance across national regimes and regional blocs; the digital divide between technology-haves and have-nots; widening inequalities due to geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China; the exclusion of developing countries in AI governance; concentrated private-sector power among a handful of tech giants; and the erosion of human rights protections. 

A joint secretariat comprising the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET), and the Executive Office of the Secretary-General (EOSG) supports the Dialogue’s organisation and follow-up, each bringing different experiences and expertise in telecommunications and AI governance, as well as the varied kinds of political power needed to move the needle.

Origins, architecture, and stakeholder expectations

How did we get here, and what finally led most stakeholders to agree that the world needed a separate tech-governance track to coordinate global AI governance? The road to the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance began in 2023, when the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) convened a High-Level Advisory Body (HLAB) on AI to examine ways to strengthen international cooperation on AI governance. HLAB was established in the context of the GDC, and the wider ‘Pact of the Future’, established in the realisation that humanity faced catastrophic challenges in the face of AI, including climate change and widening inequalities, distancing us from reaching the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The Pact of the Future was supposed to be a new social contract or a new set of commitments by Member States to address these problems.

The Advisory Body’s final report, Governing AI for Humanity, recognised that while there was growing multilateral cooperation in AI governance, Global South countries were left out. There was also a growing recognition that AI was evolving faster than any existing institution could manage, and that a patchwork of inoperable national and regional policies, corporate self-governance standards, and exclusive multilateral clubs were filling the governance vacuum in the meantime. In response, the report recommended the creation of two complementary institutions: 1) a scientific panel on AI to provide evidence-based assessments, and 2) a recurring policy dialogue that would draw on that expertise and work toward a multilateral AI governance framework. With the report annexed to the GDC, these recommendations were passed, and negotiations were set to define the mandate and operating modalities of both the scientific panel and the dialogues. 

The August 2025 resolution mandates the Dialogue to address “capacity gaps”, leveraging existing UN and multistakeholder mechanisms to “bridge AI divides, facilitate access to AI applications and build capacity in high-performance computing and related skills in developing countries”. The Dialogue provides a political stage “to discuss international cooperation, share best practices and lessons learned, and to facilitate open, transparent and inclusive discussions on AI governance with a view to enabling AI to contribute to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and to closing the digital divides between and within countries.” 

Pathways of impact: Addressing African fragmentation

For Africans, the Dialogue presents a unique opportunity to address fragmentation and exclusion. Fragmentation is a structural disadvantage that compounds Africa’s already peripheral position in AI value chains, where foreign jurisdictions benefit more from African data than Africans do, who face several hurdles to implementing the AU’s Data Policy Framework and Continental AI Strategy. With the region largely excluded from multilateral governance initiatives and challenged to exercise data sovereignty and cross-border policies in an ecosystem with diverse interests, Africans are disproportionately affected by interoperability challenges in tech governance frameworks. 

As of mid-2026, more than 80 countries globally had developed advanced AI strategies or legislation, reflecting diverse regulatory philosophies and development priorities. The EU’s AI Act adopts a risk-based, rights-focused approach; the United States relies on sectoral guidelines and industry self-regulation; China employs a state-led, centralised model that integrates AI into national planning; and most developing countries adopt a development-oriented approach. 

Most, if not all, national and regional strategies from the Global South take a development approach that primarily seeks to use AI to scale sectors with global competitive advantage, such as agriculture, as well as critical areas like health, education, and capacity building. Within this context, African countries hope to promote innovation and protect human rights by governing data both within and beyond their borders, and dismantling data silos across government institutions and stakeholders. 

However, although all these frameworks address development and human progress, they diverge in how they view challenges and priorities, creating uneven regulatory frameworks that complicate justice-oriented cross-border AI deployment. This fragmentation problem extends beyond national regulations to the institutional level too, with multiple international organisations, such as UNESCO, the OECD, and the ITU, having launched AI-related initiatives with overlapping mandates, creating a ‘regime complex’ in which no single body has clear authority, and actors can ‘forum shop’ for the most favourable venue. 

In this context, without a binding common architecture that recognises the Continental AI Strategy as the regional baseline, African states will continue to negotiate individually with dominant regulatory blocs. The Global Dialogue’s mandate to promote interoperability is therefore an important opening if African delegations arrive with a coordinated position that insists on the AU framework as a reference point.

Governing with integrity, sovereignty and accountability

Further, the continent’s national and regional policies must resist being drawn into geopolitical competition through selective incentives that fragment Africa’s collective position. Cross-border cooperation on AI data, minerals, labour, and infrastructure should follow already existing domestic laws and regional frameworks anchored in the AU Continental AI Strategy, rather than being negotiated bilaterally under pressure from dominant AI powers. Better coordination among national institutions can ensure that agreements reached at the Dialogue level are implemented by the relevant bodies at home. Otherwise, Africa will keep experiencing the same AI injustices and inequalities it voices in global forums. 

Equally important is the integrity of AI governance within African states themselves. States must honour the AU Continental AI Strategy’s calls to establish independent oversight institutions to enforce compliance, provide redress mechanisms, and hold both private actors and governments accountable. This can override a documented pattern in which states undermine democratic processes by simultaneously acting as both regulators and deployers of AI. The Dialogue will produce norms, and, if we are lucky, resolutions; meaning the real test of Africa’s engagement is whether it can translate its participation into domestic accountability structures that outlast the two sessions of the Global Dialogue.