UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Thursday to approve a 40-member global scientific panel on the impacts and risks of artificial intelligence, which the United States strongly objects to.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who established the panel, called the adoption “a fundamental step toward global scientific understanding of AI.”
“In a world where AI is accelerating rapidly,” he said, “this panel will provide what is missing: rigorous, independent scientific insight that enables all Member States, regardless of their technological capacity, to participate on an equal footing.”
He has described it as the first fully independent global scientific body dedicated to bridging the AI knowledge gap and assessing its economic and social impacts in the real world.
The vote in the 193-member assembly was 117 to 2, with the United States and Paraguay voting “no” and Tunisia and Ukraine abstaining. America’s allies in Europe, Asia and elsewhere voted in favor, along with Russia, China and many developing countries.
US mission adviser Lauren Lovelace called the panel “a significant overreach of the UN’s mandate and authority” and said: “AI governance is not a matter for the UN to dictate.”
As a global leader in AI, the United States is committed to doing everything it can to accelerate AI innovation and build infrastructure, she said, and the Trump administration will “support like-minded countries working together to encourage the development of AI consistent with our shared values.”
“We will not cede authority over AI to international bodies that may be influenced by authoritarian regimes seeking to impose their vision of controlled surveillance societies,” Lovelace said, adding that the Trump administration is concerned about “the non-transparent manner in which” the panel was chosen.
Guterres said the 40 members were selected from more than 2,600 applicants following an independent assessment by the International Telecommunications Union, the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies and UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. They will serve a term of three years.
Its members are mainly AI experts, but also come from other disciplines, including Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
There are two Americans on the panel: Vipin Kumar, a professor at the University of Minnesota who focuses on AI, data mining and high-performance computing research, and Martha Palmer, a retired professor and linguistic expert at the University of Colorado whose research includes capturing the meaning of words for complex sentences in AI.
There are two Chinese experts on the panel: Song Haitao, dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and Wang Jian, an expert in cloud computing technology at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Ukraine said it abstained because it objected to Russia’s Andrei Neznamov, an expert on AI regulation, ethics and governance, being on the panel.
