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What stakeholders shared ahead of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance

Across 1,534 submissions, stakeholders do talk about safety, discrimination and misuse. But the recurring story is broader: who has the capacity, infrastructure, sovereignty and voice to shape AI governance in the first place.

Data comes from the written submissions published by the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance.

A report by CeSIA

1,534 submissions from 6 stakeholder groups

The submissions come from civil society, the private sector, academia, governments, technical experts and international organizations.

A shared agenda appears before the differences

In every stakeholder group, at least this share of submissions lands on the same three things.

1 in 2

call for capacity-building and technical assistance , the most requested measure in the entire dialogue.

1 in 2

want coordination and networking : working groups and shared platforms that link existing efforts instead of founding new authorities.

1 in 3

name the capacity gap : too little compute, data and skill to build, evaluate or govern AI at home.

The risks named most often concern who can build and oversee AI

Each submission was read against 31 predefined risk codes. Ranking the codes by how many submissions name them puts capacity and governance concerns at the top.

The most-named risk is the shortage of national AI capacity.

42% of submissions name a national deficit in compute, data, skills or connectivity: the resources needed to build, evaluate or govern AI domestically. The next most-named risk, at 34%, is that rules diverge across jurisdictions.

Risks named across all submissions

Share of 1,534 submissions naming each risk, corrected for measured annotation error.

National AI Capacity, Compute & Connectivity Deficit

42.4%

Governance Fragmentation & Regulatory Arbitrage

34.0%

Environmental Harm

26.3%

Unfair Discrimination & Misrepresentation

25.7%

Accountability & Liability Gap

25.3%

Cultural-Linguistic Erasure & Data/Knowledge Extraction (Data Colonialism)

22.9%

Power Centralization & Unfair Benefit Distribution (Supply-Side)

22.1%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Environmental harm is the third most-named risk.

26% of submissions raise the energy, water and resource costs of AI. That is more than name privacy (20%) or false and misleading information (9%).

Risks named across all submissions

Share of 1,534 submissions naming each risk, corrected for measured annotation error.

Environmental Harm

26.3%

Compromise of Privacy

20.4%

False / Misleading Information

9.1%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions
“The environmental footprint of AI-energy consumption, water usage, compute concentration, and e-waste-is becoming a major global concern.”
FINTECHFORCE PTE LTD · Private Sector · Asia and the Pacific

Regions differ in how often they name each risk

Submissions state the region of the organization that wrote them. Grouping them this way shows which concerns each region names most.

African submissions name the capacity gap most; Western European ones least.

54% of the 264 submissions from Africa name the national capacity deficit, against 23% of the 304 from Western Europe and other states.

Participation was self-selected: these shares describe the submissions written from each region, not regional public opinion.

By region· National capacity deficit

Share of each region's submissions naming the risk, as observed. Global covers organizations that did not report a single region.

Africa

54.2%

Asia and the Pacific

44.3%

Eastern Europe

43.3%

Latin America and the Caribbean

41.6%

Global

28.9%

Western Europe and Other States

22.7%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Sovereignty concerns are highest in Latin America and Africa.

33% of submissions from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 31% from Africa, name dependence on foreign AI infrastructure, data systems or models. In Western Europe and other states, 14% do.

By region· Dependence on foreign AI

Share of each region's submissions naming the risk, as observed. Global covers organizations that did not report a single region.

Africa

31.4%

Asia and the Pacific

22.5%

Eastern Europe

14.9%

Latin America and the Caribbean

32.8%

Global

15.2%

Western Europe and Other States

13.5%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

One in three African submissions raises cultural and linguistic erasure.

34% of African submissions name the loss of local languages, cultures and knowledge in AI systems trained elsewhere, nearly three times the rate in Western Europe and other states (12%).

By region· Cultural and linguistic erasure

Share of each region's submissions naming the risk, as observed. Global covers organizations that did not report a single region.

Africa

34.5%

Asia and the Pacific

18.6%

Eastern Europe

13.4%

Latin America and the Caribbean

20.0%

Global

14.6%

Western Europe and Other States

12.2%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions
“Many AI models are trained predominantly on English and Western datasets, marginalizing local languages and cultural narratives”
Maloti Capital Holdings · Private Sector · Africa

The most-proposed measures strengthen existing institutions rather than create new ones

Each submission was also read for the form of the governance measures it proposes, from voluntary norms to binding treaties.

Coordination and capacity-building are the most-proposed measures.

60% of submissions propose coordination or networking mechanisms that link existing actors, and 60% propose capacity-building or technical assistance. Domestic regulation follows at 41%, and testing and auditing at 40%.

Measures proposed

Share of 1,534 submissions proposing each measure, corrected for measured annotation error.

Coordination & Networking Mechanisms

60.3%

Capacity-Building & Technical Assistance

59.9%

Domestic & Regional Regulation

41.1%

Testing, Auditing & Evaluation

40.4%

Non-Binding Norms & Declarations

39.1%

Infrastructure & Resource Provision

32.0%

Technical Standards & Benchmarks

31.8%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Creating new institutions is one of the least-proposed measures.

7% of submissions propose creating a new institution, and 15% propose a binding international agreement. Proposals to coordinate existing actors are eight times as common as proposals to create new institutions.

Measures proposed

Share of 1,534 submissions proposing each measure, corrected for measured annotation error.

Coordination & Networking Mechanisms

60.3%

Capacity-Building & Technical Assistance

59.9%

Binding International Agreement

14.7%

Institutional Creation

7.2%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Firms and civil society praise different qualities of the same law.

A second reading classified every regulation-endorsing submission by what it says about the regulation it cites. 71% of private-sector submissions describe it as risk-based or proportionate, with obligations scaled to the risk a system poses; no group is higher, and the difference survives correction for multiple comparisons. The emphasis reverses on the other side: civil society is the group most likely to stress binding, enforceable rules (44%, against 30% of firms) and to describe regulation as protecting rights (29%, against 16%).

Private sector, compared· How they describe it

Share of each group's submissions, as observed. The description panel is among regulation-endorsing submissions only.

Private SectorCivil Society

Risk-based & proportionate

70.7%55.9%

Binding & enforceable

30.4%44.1%

Rights-protective

15.8%28.8%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Around the law, firms endorse the measures they would operate.

28% of private-sector submissions point to internal governance controls such as risk frameworks and model policies, against 11% of government submissions: firms endorse them more than twice as often, the largest over-representation of any measure by any group. 34% endorse monitoring and incident reporting (18% of governments) and 50% technical standards (45%). Counting any measure that runs inside a company, 44% of private-sector submissions endorse at least one, against 31% of governments.

Private sector, compared· Measures firms run themselves

Share of each group's submissions, as observed. The description panel is among regulation-endorsing submissions only.

Private SectorGovernment

Internal governance & controls

28.2%11.1%

Monitoring & incident reporting

33.7%17.5%

Technical standards

49.5%45.2%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

The gap opens on measures that would bind firms from outside.

6% of private-sector submissions endorse a binding international agreement, against 11% of civil society's, the only group significantly above the corpus on treaties. 5% propose creating new institutions, against 22% of governments, for whom institution-building is the signature move. And 8% draw at least one red line, an outright prohibition on some use of AI, against 17% of civil society's.

Private sector, compared· Measures that bind from outside

Share of each group's submissions, as observed. The description panel is among regulation-endorsing submissions only.

Binding international agreement

5.8% Private Sector10.8% Civil Society

Creating new institutions

5.3% Private Sector22.2% Government

Draws at least one red line

8.4% Private Sector17.0% Civil Society
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Red lines: the uses of AI stakeholders want ruled out entirely

Beyond naming risks and proposing measures, some submissions demand that a specific use of AI be prohibited outright or held to an absolute limit, rather than merely regulated.

12%

of the 1,534 submissions call for at least one red line.

What those red lines target

The red lines cluster on keeping a human in charge.

Among the 185 submissions that draw one, two in five want to bar AI from deciding high-stakes matters on its own, by far the most-named red line. Limits on frontier and superintelligent AI, on uncontainable systems, and on mass surveillance follow at around one in ten each.

Among submissions that draw a red line

Share of the 185 submissions that name at least one red line.

No fully autonomous high-stakes decisions

40.0%

No superintelligence

10.8%

No AI that could cause loss of control

10.3%

No mass surveillance, biometric identification, and social scoring

9.7%

No lethal autonomous weapons and military targeting

7.0%

No manipulative, behavior-distorting AI

7.0%

No unsafe AI for children

7.0%

No algorithmic discrimination and service denial

5.4%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

One family of red lines has no counterpart in today's regulation.

Alongside the application harms that echo the EU AI Act's prohibited tier, a distinct frontier-safety cluster appears. Among the submissions that draw a red line, 11% want limits on developing frontier or superintelligent AI, 10% want kill-switches and containment for agentic systems, 7% name lethal autonomous weapons, and 5% name AI uplift for weapons of mass harm.

Among submissions that draw a red line

Share of the 185 submissions that name at least one red line.

No superintelligence

10.8%

No AI that could cause loss of control

10.3%

No lethal autonomous weapons and military targeting

7.0%

No AI uplift for weapons of mass harm

4.9%
aidialoguereport.orgby the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA)
Source: UN Global Dialogue submissions

Methodology

The analysis covers all 1,534 written submissions published by the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance.

The categories were fixed before the corpus was read: 31 risk codes in 9 domains, most taken from the MIT AI Risk Repository1, and 15 forms a governance measure can take, adapted from OECD and academic taxonomies of policy instruments2.

Each submission was then read independently by three language models from three different developers, so their mistakes are less likely to line up. A model cannot simply assert an annotation: every annotation must come with a word-for-word quote from the submission, and software checks that the quote is actually there (99.8% of the 36,843 quotes cited across the corpus were). An annotation is accepted directly when the two primary models both support it with verified quotes. Contested codes (52% of the 18,667 decisions) went to a separate arbiter model, Claude Opus 4.8, which accepted 46% of them, with its own quote checked the same way. The result is 13,425 annotations.

To measure how accurate that process is, a human labeled a sample of 60 submissions. Against that benchmark, the system reaches 94% precision and 93% recall on risks, and 92% precision and 96% recall on governance measures.

Every share on this page is corrected for that measured error rate using a Rogan-Gladen prevalence correction3. Differences between stakeholder groups or regions are only reported when they survive a false-discovery correction (Benjamini-Hochberg4) across every comparison tested, and they should still be read as exploratory.

Two limits apply to everything above. Participation was self-selected, so these figures describe what the people and organizations who wrote in chose to say, not world opinion, and each submission counts once whether it came from an individual or a ministry. And absence is weak evidence: a submission that never mentions a risk has not said the risk does not matter. Every accepted code links back to its quote, and any submission can be audited in the explorer.

Acknowledgements: Félix Dorn led the analysis, writing, and implementation. Markov Grey, Arthur Grimonpont, Charbel-Raphaël Segerie, Épiphanie Gédéon contributed input and feedback.

  1. Slattery et al. (2025), The AI Risk Repository: A Comprehensive Meta-Review, Database, and Taxonomy of Risks From Artificial Intelligence, arXiv:2408.12622. ↩
  2. OECD/EC (2021), STIP Compass Taxonomies Describing STI Policy Data, policy-instruments taxonomy; Maas & Villalobos (2023), International AI Institutions: A Literature Review of Models, Examples, and Proposals, Institute for Law & AI. ↩
  3. Rogan & Gladen (1978), Estimating Prevalence From the Results of a Screening Test, American Journal of Epidemiology 107(1). ↩
  4. Benjamini & Hochberg (1995), Controlling the False Discovery Rate: A Practical and Powerful Approach to Multiple Testing, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 57(1). ↩

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