The UN global dialogue on AI governance should address the AI language divide

The UN will hold a global dialogue on AI governance in Geneva on July 6-7. The author calls for making the AI "language divide" a priority topic and elevating investment in multilingual capabilities to a national or regional interest on par with "sovereign AI." Users of low-resource languages experience worse accessibility, effectiveness, and safety: expressing the same content requires more tokens, creating a "token tax" that raises costs and latency; machine-translating prompts into low-resource languages can jailbreak models, and malicious inputs are also more likely to generate unsafe content after translation.