The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly approved the creation of a 40-member global scientific panel dedicated to assessing the impacts and risks of artificial intelligence. This significant step, established by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, was adopted by a vote of 117-2, with the United States and Paraguay casting the dissenting votes, and Tunisia and Ukraine abstaining. Guterres hailed the adoption as a "foundational step toward global scientific understanding of AI," emphasizing its role in providing rigorous, independent scientific insight to enable all member states, regardless of technological capacity, to engage on an equal footing.

Described as the first fully independent global scientific body focused on AI, the panel's primary objective is to bridge the existing knowledge gap in artificial intelligence and comprehensively assess its real-world economic and social impacts. This initiative aims to ensure that as AI technology rapidly advances, a shared, independent understanding of its complexities and implications is readily available to the international community.

Despite broad international support, with America’s allies in Europe and Asia, along with Russia, China, and many developing countries, voting in favor, the United States expressed strong objections. U.S. Mission counselor Lauren Lovelace characterized the panel as "a significant overreach of the U.N.’s mandate and competence," asserting that "AI governance is not a matter for the U.N. to dictate." The U.S. also voiced concerns about the "non-transparent way" the panel members were chosen and stated its unwillingness to cede authority over AI to international bodies potentially influenced by authoritarian regimes seeking to impose controlled surveillance societies. The Trump administration reiterated its commitment to accelerating AI innovation and supporting like-minded nations in developing AI consistent with shared values.

In response to transparency concerns, Secretary-General Guterres clarified that the 40 panel members were selected from a pool of over 2,600 candidates. This rigorous selection process involved an independent review conducted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.N. Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, and UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The selected experts will serve three-year terms, comprising predominantly AI specialists alongside professionals from diverse disciplines.

The panel includes notable figures such as Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. American representation on the panel includes Vipin Kumar, a University of Minnesota professor specializing in AI, data mining, and high-performance computing research, and Martha Palmer, a retired University of Colorado professor and linguistics expert whose work involves capturing the meaning of words for complex sentences in AI. China is represented by Song Haitao, dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and Wang Jian, a cloud-computing technology expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Ukraine's abstention from the vote was specifically attributed to its objection to the inclusion of Russia’s Andrei Neznamov, an expert in AI regulation, ethics, and governance.