UN And ITU Launch AI For Good Global Commission

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff, and ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin announced the launch of the AI for Good Global Commission on July 2, 2026, according to the ITU's official press release. Kagame and Benioff co-chair the 44-member body; Bogdan-Martin serves as vice-chair. "One thing is certain: technology is supposed to be a force for good, and we have a responsibility to use it accordingly," Kagame said. "The promise of AI is built on not only incredible opportunities for the growth of our economy, but on the foundation of trust that is required for our shared success," Benioff said. The official founding roster includes heads of state and government from Rwanda, Estonia, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Namibia, Nigeria, Singapore, and Togo; tech executives Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Andy Jassy (Amazon), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Jack Clark (Anthropic), Aidan Gomez (Cohere), James Manyika (Google/Alphabet), and Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm) among others; and the heads of UNDP, UNESCO, WIPO, and the WTO. Axios's July 1 preview of the launch also named a Saudi Arabian policymaker as an expected member; that name does not appear on the ITU's published 44-member founding list.

The commission builds on the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, which previously helped set global priorities for connectivity and digital inclusion. Its stated priority is narrowing the divide facing the 2.2 billion people the ITU says remain offline, one-quarter of the world's population, positioning digital access as the commission's most concrete initial goal alongside broader AI trust-and-safety questions. "No organization can single-handedly put AI at the service of all humanity," Bogdan-Martin said. "It will take collective leadership and the combined expertise of partners from across sectors to ensure AI benefits all people, everywhere."

Jensen Huang's presence carries more than symbolic weight: Nvidia's chips underpin most large-scale AI training globally, so commission discussions on compute access and infrastructure gaps run through hardware Nvidia largely controls, a dynamic worth tracking for any enterprise weighing AI-infrastructure or export-control exposure. More broadly, the roster spans regulators and vendors who often sit on opposite sides of compliance conversations, so its early output, if any, may double as an informal signal of where multilateral AI governance is heading before formal rules catch up.

Neither the ITU's press release nor Benioff's public comments specify binding deliverables; the commission is designed as a smaller, faster body meant to avoid the procedural weight of full diplomatic consensus. Open questions include who bears liability when an AI system deployed under the commission's guidance causes harm, whether member states can decline standards they helped draft, and how the group reconciles its corporate members' commercial interests with the governance principles it advances. The commission's first meeting on July 8 runs alongside the ITU's AI for Good Global Summit (July 7-10) and the UN's inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance (July 6-7), part of Geneva's Digital Week, cementing the city's role as a recurring venue for international AI standard-setting.