Centre for Future Generations

A successful first Dialogue produces three things: a shared problem statement, a working methodology and a follow-up architecture. On the problem statement: the governance struggle runs on two fronts. The first is the tension between tech companies and nation states; firms shape finance, markets and public discourse, and enforcement authorities are catching up. The second is technology as an instrument of US–China competition, most visibly in the contest over access to and control of global data. Both fronts share one diagnostic: the ungoverned transfer of autonomy from humans to systems whose behaviour is opaque, unaccountable and difficult to reverse. That formulation lets the seven thematic areas in Resolution A/RES/79/325 cohere around a single question: at what level of autonomy is each system operating relative to its users, and is that level governed? On methodology: autonomy-gap analysis addresses the first front. The gap between the autonomy a law sanctions and the autonomy a system exercises in deployment is measurable. CFG's Enforcement Tracker shows this for the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Fairness Act. The methodology transfers. Adoption at the UN level lets governments report on enforcement reality, not just legislative intent. On follow-up: the co-chair summary should commit to three concrete mechanisms before the May 2027 New York session: an intergovernmental expert group on common audit methodologies across cognitive, security and labour domains; a reporting line into OHCHR, ILO and UNESCO under their existing mandates; and a public registry of national autonomy-gap findings. For the second front, the Dialogue should keep open alternative pathways modelled on UN General Assembly resolutions, where the rest of the international community can move without being blocked by, or caught between, Washington and Beijing. Middle powers are where that coalition lives.

• Safe, secure and trustworthy AI
• Interoperability of governance approaches
• Transparency, accountability, and human oversight
• Protection and promotion of human rights

Safe, secure and trustworthy AI Interoperability of governance approaches Protection and promotion of human rights Transparency, accountability, and human oversight Please briefly explain your selection. (Max. 300 words) Three of the four are priorities for CFG. Safe, secure and trustworthy AI is the umbrella; the other three are where the work happens. Transparency, accountability and human oversight is the first priority. CFG's Enforcement Tracker measures the gap between the level of autonomy a law sanctions and the level a system exercises in deployment. We have built this evidence base for the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Fairness Act. The same methodology transfers to other jurisdictions and to international monitoring. Without enforcement data, oversight is aspirational. With it, governments can report on operational reality, not legislative intent. The right most directly at stake is freedom of thought. AI systems are already intervening in the cognitive processes that freedom of thought exists to protect. CFG proposes cognitive integrity as the governance standard for the age of AI: the condition under which people think, decide and act based on their goals and values rather than being subverted by external systems. That standard cuts across education, healthcare, public administration and the labour market. The Dialogue should engage with cognitive integrity as a shared governance concept and bring these agencies into the conversation together. Interoperability of governance approaches is the third priority. Fragmentation produces arbitrage. As Europe's AI Act begins to bite, deployment shifts to less regulated jurisdictions. The Dialogue's value is its universal mandate: it is the only forum in which a common audit methodology can be developed across the cognitive, security and labour domains where autonomy transfer is most consequential. Interoperability is not harmonisation of every rule. It is shared methods for measuring whether rules are working. Safe, secure and trustworthy AI frames the destination. Oversight, rights and interoperability are how the Dialogue gets there.

Five cross-cutting issues sit across the seven themes. The first is intergenerational. The seven themes ask what AI does to people now. They do not ask what irreversible commitments today's governance choices impose on people who do not yet have a vote. Autonomy transfer compounds: a system permitted to operate at a given level today shapes the workflows and institutional muscle memory that constrain what is reversible tomorrow. The Dialogue should commission a working note on intergenerational reversibility. The second is the compute and energy substrate. TSMC fabricates most of the advanced-node logic AI runs on. ASML is the sole supplier of EUV lithography. NVIDIA controls most of the AI accelerator market. Governance of safety, oversight and human rights at the application layer cannot bind decisions taken at the substrate layer by firms who answer to neither the user state nor the host state. The Dialogue should treat compute concentration as a governance object, not a market structure question. The third is the civil-military boundary. The seven themes are civilian-coded. The fastest autonomy transfer is happening in defence and security applications, where the EU AI Act, the AI Liability Directive and most national frameworks do not reach. NATO, the OSCE and the UN First Committee have parallel conversations the Dialogue does not currently connect. A reporting line into the Office for Disarmament Affairs, alongside OHCHR, ILO and UNESCO, would close the gap between civilian governance and the domain where ungoverned autonomy carries the highest immediate risk. The fourth is planetary boundaries. The seven themes leave AI's energy and water budgets exogenous. The fifth is cultural convergence. Systems trained on similar datasets and designed by similar people narrow what gets reproduced at scale. Cultural diversity is a governance question.

Europe is where governance ambition collides with enforcement reality first. On transparency, accountability and oversight: the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Fairness Act are the most serious regulatory regimes for autonomy transfer anywhere. Centre for Future Generation's Enforcement Tracker shows enforcement is lagging legislative intent in all three. The DSA is in its third year of application; systemic-risk audits are still maturing. The AI Act's general-purpose provisions entered into force in August 2025; the Code of Practice is still being negotiated. The autonomy gap is widest where capacity is thinnest. Autonomy-gap analysis is the EU's contribution to the Dialogue. On human rights: the cognitive integrity of European information environments is the under-discussed frontline. AI-driven personalisation in healthcare, education and public administration is shaping how citizens form judgements before any rights-based framework reaches it. CFG proposes cognitive integrity as a governance standard the EU should lead on. Europe has the legal infrastructure; the question is whether it has the will. On interoperability: the Brussels effect has limits. As the AI Act bites, deployment shifts to jurisdictions where rules are looser. Without shared audit methodology with the UK, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Australia, European regulation risks producing arbitrage, not standards. The opportunity is a middle-power coalition with the convening capacity Brussels uniquely holds. On safe, secure and trustworthy AI: the most consequential European gap is the civil-military boundary. The EU AI Act exempts national security. The AI Liability Directive was withdrawn in February 2025. Defence applications are advancing faster than civilian governance can track. The Security and Technology Compact at DG IDEA is the right architecture; the Dialogue should connect to it.

The Dialogue is the only universal forum where international cooperation on AI governance can be built. First, the Dialogue can produce what bilateral and plurilateral processes cannot: a shared diagnostic method governments can use across jurisdictions. Autonomy-gap analysis is the method CFG has built for the EU's digital rulebook: measuring the gap between the autonomy a law sanctions and the autonomy a system exercises in deployment. The Dialogue is where it transfers to others. Second, the Dialogue can host the connective architecture that civilian-coded governance currently lacks. AI's hardest governance problems (military, compute, energy, cognition) cut across mandates no single agency holds. A reporting line from the Dialogue into OHCHR, ILO, UNESCO and the Office for Disarmament Affairs would let those bodies report on AI together rather than separately. Third, the Dialogue offers legitimacy for middle-power coordination. The US–China binary will not produce universal rules in the time available. Resolutions modelled on the General Assembly format let the rest of the international community move on shared standards without being blocked by, or caught between, Washington and Beijing. Every state has a seat at the Dialogue. Universal participation makes the coordination credible. The role the Dialogue should not play: producing a single global regulatory text. Harmonisation of every rule is neither realistic nor desirable. Different jurisdictions face different threats. What they need in common is a shared method for measuring whether their rules are working, a shared vocabulary for naming the autonomy transfers their citizens face, and a calendar that holds governments to follow-up. The Dialogue can deliver all three.

The Dialogue's added value is connection, not duplication. The Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI is the first binding international treaty on AI. It opened for signature in September 2024 with non-Council parties already among the signatories. The rights-based architecture is the floor; the Dialogue's job is to extend it geographically. The OECD AI Principles and the Global Partnership on AI hold the most developed methodology base outside the EU. The Dialogue should scale that methodology to non-OECD jurisdictions and integrate it with the autonomy-gap method CFG has built for the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Fairness Act. CFG's Enforcement Tracker provides that operational data. UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of AI is in implementation across 194 member states. UNESCO has normative reach the Dialogue should reinforce by tying enforcement reporting to it. The AI Safety Institutes network (UK, US, Japan, Singapore and others) holds operational evaluation capacity the UN system lacks. Linking AISI protocols to UN reporting closes the methodology-to-monitoring gap. Hardware-enabled mechanisms, the chip-level governance work CFG and others have developed, are the technical infrastructure that makes verification credible at international scale, analogous to IAEA inspection regimes. The International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (IASEAI) brings the AI safety and ethics communities together. Its inaugural Paris conference in February 2025 issued a ten-point Call to Action on binding safety standards and global cooperation. The Dialogue needs that civic track alongside state-led tracks. The High-Level Advisory Body on AI and the Independent International Scientific Panel created under A/RES/79/325 are the Dialogue's institutional companions. They should be commissioned to produce annual autonomy-gap findings from national reporting. What none of these has and the Dialogue can provide: universal participation, civilian and military reach in one forum, a public follow-up calendar.

Member states bring sovereignty and reporting obligations. The Dialogue should require annual national autonomy-gap reports, on the model of the Human Rights Council's UPR. That makes participation substantive, not ceremonial. Civil society and research organisations bring methodology and evidence. CFG's Enforcement Tracker is one example: an operational dataset on EU digital rulebook enforcement. The Dialogue should build a permanent civil society track with rapporteur status across the seven themes. Contributors should be paid, not asked to volunteer. CFG's Four P's of effective enforcement (Policy, Practice, People, Politics) frames how civil society plugs into operational governance. Industry brings capability, deployment data and risk visibility no government has. The Dialogue should require frontier developers to submit autonomy and capability data, like financial reporting. Voluntary commitments are not enough. Standards bodies (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42, IEEE) bring technical interoperability. They should sit in working groups, not in observer status. Parliamentarians bring democratic accountability the executive track misses. An inter-parliamentary line on the IPU–UN model would close that gap. The format should follow three rules. First, working tracks by theme, each producing one deliverable per Dialogue cycle. Second, a permanent secretariat with technical capacity, not a rotating chair. Third, a public follow-up dashboard tracking commitments against outcomes between sessions. The single most useful structural change: tie the Dialogue's calendar to a public reporting cycle. Without that, the Dialogue is a forum. With it, it is an accountability mechanism.

Three groups are systematically underrepresented in current AI governance forums. The first is future generations. They cannot represent themselves because they do not yet exist. Yet today's autonomy-transfer decisions impose constraints on people who will live with them. Wales has a Future Generations Commissioner under its 2015 Well-being of Future Generations Act; the model is replicable. The Dialogue should require an intergenerational impact assessment for each thematic working group's output, and create a standing intergenerational rapporteur. CFG was created to put future generations into present-day technology decisions. The Dialogue is the natural multilateral home for that work. The second is the Global South. AI training, deployment and benefits sit in a small number of jurisdictions. Governance discussions sit in a smaller set still. The Dialogue's format already has universal participation; what it does not yet have is universal preparation. Regional pre-Dialogue consultations, hosted by African Union, ASEAN, CARICOM, CELAC and Pacific Islands Forum secretariats and resourced from the UN budget rather than donor priorities, would let Southern positions enter the Geneva and New York sessions on equal footing. Travel and translation budgets are not optional. The third is workers and the people whose cognition AI now mediates: pupils in classrooms, patients in clinics, citizens in administrative systems. These are the populations the seven themes are about, yet they have no seat. The Dialogue should establish a community-witness track with structured testimony from teachers, doctors, social workers and trade unions. ILO has the convening capacity for the labour side. UNESCO and WHO can convene the cognitive side.

Five formats earn their place by producing something other formats cannot. First, live autonomy-gap audits. Demonstrations run in plenary using real systems and real legislation. Member states and civil society watch the gap measured in real time. Second, citizens' assemblies on AI governance, randomly selected and convened in parallel with the Dialogue. Ireland's constitutional convention model is the precedent. The output is not advisory; it is published alongside member-state submissions and tabled in working tracks. Third, AI-assisted deliberation platforms modelled on Taiwan's vTaiwan/Polis system. CFG's AI Preparedness report names these as tools that surface consensus rather than amplify division. The Dialogue should run them in the months between sessions to surface where actual agreement exists across jurisdictions. Fourth, working-track residencies. Civil society researchers, technical experts and parliamentarians in residence with the Dialogue secretariat for six-month rotations. They produce track outputs, not observer reports. Fifth, witness sessions with structured testimony from teachers, doctors, social workers, trade union representatives and frontline communities. Brief panels, public record, formal response from each working track within thirty days. What unifies these formats: each produces a public artefact that can be cited the next year. The Dialogue's risk is becoming a forum where things are said and nothing is recorded. Each format above generates a record that survives the meeting. The least innovative format is also the most necessary: a public registry of every commitment made at the Dialogue, with status updates published quarterly. Without that, even the best engagement format produces no accountability.

Five examples worth scaling. CFG's Enforcement Tracker measures what governance actually achieves in deployment. It logs every public enforcement action under the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and GDPR. The Tracker turns enforcement from anecdote into dataset. The Tracker also enables cross-legislative learning. By comparing enforcement dynamics across different regulatory frameworks, policymakers can identify which governance approaches are more effective, where coordination gaps exist, and how lessons from one domain can inform another. Other jurisdictions can build the same monitoring against their own rulebooks. Without a tracker, regulators cannot know what their own laws are doing. Hardware-enabled mechanisms (HEMs) are chip-level verification embedded in AI accelerators. CFG and others have proposed them as the technical infrastructure for international compute governance, analogous to IAEA inspection regimes. The mechanism is concrete: tamper-evident telemetry on training runs, exportable to neutral verifiers. HEMs make compute concentration governable. AI Safety Institute evaluations are the closest existing model for pre-deployment testing. The UK AISI evaluates frontier models pre-deployment under agreements with leading developers. The Dialogue should connect AISI protocols to UN reporting under A/RES/79/325. Public algorithm registries are working at the city level. Amsterdam, Helsinki and others maintain registers of public-sector AI systems with risk scores and contact lines. The EU AI Act's high-risk database extends the model. The registry is a low-cost transparency mechanism that scales to national and international levels. The Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI is the only binding international treaty with a rights-based floor. Its parties already extend beyond the Council. The Dialogue should treat the Framework Convention as the rights baseline and build interoperability with it, not duplicate it. What links these five: each produces verifiable evidence about what AI systems do, not what they are claimed to do.