Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform healthcare, education, agriculture, and economic growth, its rapid and uneven development could also widen global inequality. The report, prepared by an independent panel of 40 international experts, stresses that countries with limited AI infrastructure, computing resources, and technical expertise risk falling further behind as AI capabilities become concentrated in a handful of nations and companies.
The report highlights that access to AI tools alone is not enough to ensure equitable benefits. Many developing countries rely on foreign AI models, cloud infrastructure, and data pipelines, limiting their control over how AI systems are designed and deployed. The panel also notes that language barriers remain a major challenge, with most AI models performing well only in a small number of widely spoken languages, leaving thousands of languages underrepresented.
Experts also raise concerns about AI's broader risks, including misinformation, election interference, cybercrime, privacy violations, environmental impacts from energy-intensive data centers, and the possibility of increasingly autonomous AI systems behaving in unexpected or harmful ways. They emphasize that most governments, including those in advanced economies, currently lack the technical capacity to adequately evaluate and oversee the most powerful AI models.
To address these challenges, the UN is urging greater international cooperation through its upcoming Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva. The report calls for investments in local AI infrastructure, AI literacy, safety research, and shared governance frameworks that ensure AI's benefits are distributed more fairly while reducing the technology's societal and economic risks.
