All 193 UN member states took their seats at Geneva’s Palexpo on Monday for the opening of the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the inaugural two-day session of a forum that organizers describe as the first UN process on artificial intelligence to seat every member state alongside private-sector, academic, and civil-society participants.

The dialogue was established by General Assembly resolution A/RES/79/325 as a concrete outcome of the Global Digital Compact and the Pact for the Future. Its co-chairs are Ambassador Egriselda López of El Salvador and Ambassador Rein Tammsaar of Estonia, and its opening speakers include Amandeep Singh Gill, the Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, and ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin. Six months of consultations produced more than 1,500 written submissions from governments, companies, and civil society before the gavel dropped.

The scheduling is deliberate. The Geneva session runs July 6–7, dovetailing into the WSIS Forum 2026 (July 6–10) and the ITU AI for Good Global Summit (July 7–10); single media accreditation covers all three, with livestreams on UN Web TV. A second session is planned for New York in May 2027.

The politics are less tidy. The Trump administration has argued against UN-led AI governance, favoring a coalition of “trusted partners” pursuing a “pro-innovation” approach, and the dialogue is being framed as non-binding, a forum for surfacing shared priorities rather than imposing rules. Ahead of the opening, the co-chairs told Devex the UN remains the only body capable of convening all 193 states simultaneously.

That defense is itself the story. Two decades after the WSIS process yielded the ITU-hosted internet governance architecture that Washington now questions, Geneva is again the venue where multilateralism argues for its own relevance, this time on the technology its most powerful member state would rather govern elsewhere.

Sources