Global South seeks seat at AI governance table, not just as a consumer

Minette Libom Li Likeng, Cameroon's minister of posts and telecommunications, opened a side forum at the World AI Conference in east China's Shanghai on Friday with a clear demand – the Global South must no longer be a passive consumer of foreign technologies, nor a recipient of standards set without its voice.

AI governance is not sustainable if it is not built on effective participation of all countries, she said.

The session on AI governance and sustainable development, co-hosted by Fudan University's Center for Global AI Innovation Governance, tilted deliberately toward voices often marginalized in global AI debates. Zhao Houlin, former secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, noted that 2.2 billion people still lack internet access.

You cannot talk about training local models if a country cannot afford stable electricity and networks, he said.

Nicholas Dirks, president of the New York Academy of Sciences and former UC Berkeley chancellor, warned that corporate incentives do not naturally align with public interest. He cited DeepMind's founder, who in 2020 had to abandon scientific progress to chase OpenAI after ChatGPT launched. Independent governance institutions are indispensable, Dirks said.

A Cambodian official delivered one of the most provocative lines. The countries that will lead AI are not those with the most money to invest, said Sam Sethserey, director general of Cambodia's ICT department. The countries should be those that can build public trust, he added.

The forum launched several concrete outputs – an updated ethics review AI agent, a Global AI Governance Index covering 40 economies, an English casebook of Shanghai SME applications, and five reports on topics from superintelligence risk to AI companionship governance.

A second roundtable focused on the UN-backed AI Governance Capacity Development Network, launched in Geneva this month with 23 member centers. Mehdi Snene, senior advisor to the UN secretary-general's digital envoy, said this is just a start, as one initiative may not be enough to fill the gap.

Khaled Ghedira, vice president of the African Scientific Research and Innovation Council, recalled a saying from one of his US counterparts, "America invents, Europe regulates, and the rest consume." He noted that the saying has since evolved into "China and America invent, Europe regulates, and the rest consume." With this system, all countries will have the opportunity to co-create, co-regulate and co-consume, he added.