Canada Pushes AI Safety and Equity at UN

Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, David Lametti, told The Canadian Press that AI governance is one of his team's priorities in New York, and that Ottawa is working with other countries to try to have the technology proceed safely and benefit more than just the wealthiest states. "AI governance is something that the UN has to do, has a responsibility to do," Lametti said. "The UN remains critically important, [it] remains perhaps the only institution in the world that can convene that kind of discussion on a more or less equal footing between Meta, Amazon Web, Microsoft, Apple and Google, and all of these other countries." Lametti started the UN role in November 2025, after serving as Prime Minister Mark Carney's principal secretary and, before that, as federal justice minister; he says AI has taken up "between 10 and 15 per cent" of his time. He described "definitely alignment" among countries on the need for AI safety, along with concern from emerging economies, particularly in Asia, about being left behind. AI was also a major theme at this month's G7 summit in France, where leading economies sought consensus on regulating AI platforms without slowing economic growth.

Lametti's UN engagement has concrete recent touchpoints beyond this interview: in May, he hosted the chair of the International AI Safety Report at Canada's UN mission for a discussion on how middle powers can encourage safe AI use, a report that flagged risks from blackmail and information manipulation to biological and chemical weapons development. Last year, Canada co-hosted a panel with Brazil on inclusive AI for people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and women. Lametti will attend the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva next month.

Multilateral venues like the UN typically produce coordination frameworks and norms rather than binding technical standards, but they shape the vocabulary, equity, safety, and access, that later surfaces in national regulation and procurement language. Teams operating across borders should watch for capacity-building and data-sharing initiatives aimed at emerging economies, since these can open new partnerships as well as new compliance obligations.

Concrete deliverables from the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva next month, follow-through from the G7's AI discussions, and whether Lametti's "equity" framing translates into specific UN funding or standards proposals rather than continued diplomatic positioning.