Open letter faults UN Secretary-General's AI commission for excluding civil society voices

Tech Policy Press reports from the 2026 AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, where the UN launched an AI for Good Global Commission. The commission was unveiled by Rwandan president Paul Kagame, together with Salesforce's Benioff and the ITU's Doreen Bogdan-Martin, its secretary-general. Its membership, above 40 people, spans heads of state, UN leadership and business figures from Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft and ZTE. The article says civil society and academic voices are absent, a gap raised in an open letter addressed to the UN secretary-general, which says the shaping of AI governance should not rest on government and corporate views alone.

Sonia Livingstone, a London School of Economics professor who signed the letter, says civil society groups working with marginalized people are often the quickest to hear from those affected by AI, so leaving them out misses the people most likely to spot failures. Giulio Coppi of Access Now says his organization is holding its own "Not AI for Good" summit the following week, arguing that the main summit largely listened to industry define "good."

The commission's mandate is practical rather than regulatory: widening access, building trust and narrowing digital divides, and the ITU puts the number of people still offline at 2.2 billion. It is modeled on the Broadband Commission created in 2010, which after 15 years of advocacy still leaves a quarter of the world's population disconnected. ITU deputy secretary-general Tomas Lamanauskas said that, politically, truly binding global frameworks are close to impossible at present.

The article also points to technical standards as the more tangible route, citing an ITU benchmarking standard for foundation models and new ITU focus groups on embodied AI and AI agent identity.