Can the UN get the world to agree on AI?

At this year's AI for Good Global Summit, the UN launched the AI for Good Global Committee, whose members include heads of state, UN officials, and executives from Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, and ZTE, but civil society and academia were excluded, and an open letter criticized that AI governance should not be shaped solely by state and corporate perspectives. The committee is positioned as pragmatic rather than regulatory, with tasks including expanding accessibility, building trust, and narrowing the digital divide, while the ITU says 2.2 billion people worldwide still lack internet access. The summit also advanced a foundation model evaluation framework based on ITU Recommendation F.748.44, and established two new focus groups on embodied AI and AI agent identity verification, with evaluation work led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. The article argues that in a landscape where the U.S. prefers market-led approaches, the EU emphasizes regulation, and China participates heavily in international standards organizations, a global treaty is difficult to achieve, and standard-setting is becoming a key battleground in AI governance competition.