Pressure is building to develop a set of AI governance regulations that would be effective across borders. The place to start may be child safety.
“No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI,” warned United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the first Global Dialogue On AI Governance (July 6-7) conference in Geneva. “We do not let medicine reach a child until it is proven safe; we test every toy. Yet AI has reached our children—their learning, their friendships, their most private questions—before anyone asked what it would do to them.”
Guterres called for an AI Child Safety Pledge that would require companies to prove that any system accessible to children is safe and has zero tolerance for sexual abuse. Guterres said AI systems must connect any child exhibiting signs of distress to human support.
Child safety may be the lever that galvanizes a broader discussion about AI governance. Guterres noted that the concentration of AI power in a handful of companies means most countries “have no say in decisions that will shape their future.”
While acknowledging the benefits of AI across many fields, “a technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work and tilt the balance of security is being deployed faster than anyone, including the people building it, can keep up,” said Guterres. “Innovation needs guardrails. If AI is to be powerful, it must be governed.”
Who sets the guardrails also is a priority issue. While AI is to varying degrees subject to national regulations and technical standards, governance frameworks have been shaped predominantly by countries with advanced AI sectors. However, countries very exposed to AI’s consequences have had little say in how those guardrails are designed. A report presented at the conference noted that 75 percent of the computing power among the world’s top 500 AI supercomputers is concentrated in the U.S.
Guterres said his biggest concern revolved around AI use by militaries, especially lethal autonomous weapons. “Let’s call them what they are: killer robots,” said the UN Secretary General. “Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life, without human control and judgement. This is morally repugnant and it must be banned by international law.”
Guterres’ concern about AI military use is being echoed in other quarters. At an AWS summit in Washington, D.C. last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that frontier AI models are a national security issue, referring to their capabilities “as akin to digital nuclear weapons.”
Emerging AI guardrails must steer AI in a positive direction, said Guterres. “We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist. The door is still open. It will not stay open long.”
