In this image taken from video provided by Russian Presidential Press Service on Friday, July 3, 2026. Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks while visiting one of the command posts of the Joint Group of the Russian Forces, in an undisclosed location. (Russian Presidential Press Service via AP)

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The United Nations headquarters in New York. Shutterstock

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The Tower of Babel by Lucas van Valckenborch, 1595. Wikimedia Commons

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PICTURE POSED BY A MODEL File photo dated 21/08/14 of a child using an Apple iPhone smartphone. Schools cannot address issues with children's smartphone use and screen time alone, headteachers have warned. Delegates at the annual conference in Belfast for the NAHT school leaders' union voted in favour of a motion calling for national guidance on online safety to help families establish boundaries for their children with screens. Issue date: Saturday May 2, 2026. 84481834 (Press Association via AP Images)

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A woman is passing by the logo of Europese Commissie - Commission Europeenne - European Commission, at the Berlaymont building, the building of the European Commission Brussels, Friday 17 April 2026. BELGA PHOTO MARIUS BURGELMAN (Photo by Marius Burgelman/Belga/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

(Photo by Marius Burgelman/Belga/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

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The image is a very detailed, black-and-white sketch-like illustration featuring a complex scene of interconnected figures and technology. The artwork portrays various individuals in different environments to represent the relationship between technology and humans. 

In the foreground, multiple people are surrounded by computer screens filled with data visualizations, charts, and technical information. A woman seated in an armchair appears deep in thought, surrounded by data-filled monitors. Beside her, a man leans over, using a tablet to assist with their inspection of a plant or tree. In the centre, a figure holds a large frame or screen displaying anatomical illustrations, representing the use of AI to analyse medical imagery. To the left, another person is intently observing a computer screen, while a second figure nearby is deeply immersed in analysing data. A woman dominates the right side of the composition, gazing upwards as if in contemplation or envisioning something beyond the immediate scene. The background features more people, including a family holding hands, and other abstract representations of data.

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 are editors of the Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy.

The oldest story we have about technology is a cautionary tale. The book of Genesis tells us that in the plain of Shinar, the whole earth had one language and one set of words. The people said to one another: come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered. So they baked bricks and burned them hard, and they began to build. And God came down to see the city and the tower, and confused their speech, so that no one could understand his neighbor. The work stopped. The people scattered. The place was called Babel (Genesis 11:1-9).

Pope Leo XIV reached for that same story in his first encyclical, 

, to frame the emergence of artificial intelligence as a choice between two acts of construction: building another Tower of Babel, or rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem alongside Nehemiah. It is a striking choice of metaphor from a new pope who chose his name to echo the church's response to the last great technological rupture, the industrial age, under Pope Leo XIII. Whether or not you share his faith, the metaphor is worth taking seriously, because today’s engineers racing to build artificial general intelligence (“AGI”) are, knowingly or not, building at Shinar again.

But Babel is read differently from inside Judaism than in the Christian frame the Pope brings to it. Read closely, alongside the rabbis who have argued over it for two thousand years, the tale grows sharper and stranger than the commonplace warning against hubris it has become. The rabbis drew multiple lessons from Shinar, and several map precisely onto the dangers we are now again courting.

First, Babel is the story of what happens when people are objectified to achieve a higher goal.

Here the Jewish midrash is sharper than the verses themselves. In 

, the rabbis imagine the tower grown so tall that hauling a single brick to the top took a full year. When a worker fell from the scaffolding and died, no one paused. When a brick fell and shattered, the builders sat down and wept, because a brick would take a year to replace, and a man would not. When the brick matters more than the man, you are building Babel.

That image describes our economy with uncomfortable precision. AI is already reshaping the labor market, automating tasks once done by paralegals, coders, translators, illustrators and entry-level office workers, and the displacement is widely expected to widen as the systems improve. The technology can make firms remarkably productive while treating the people who once did that work as line items to be optimized away. It also describes the harder edges of where this technology could be heading: autonomous weapons that select their own targets, surveillance systems that make privacy a quaint memory, and the live, unresolved fights over how far AI's makers should go in serving the security state. The recent friction between Anthropic and the Pentagon over military uses is a preview of a permanent negotiation: who gets to decide when the apparatus is allowed to break the man for the sake of the brick.

Pope Leo gestures at this as idolatry. Responding to the encyclical, the writer Yuval Levin 

 further through Psalm 115. It speaks of idols who are made to look human but cannot partake of human life: “

they have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see.”

 (Psalm 115:5). The Psalm's chilling conclusion is that those who make such idols, and those who trust in them, become like them. That is the real hazard of building an intelligence that shares, or exceeds, human intelligence, but not other essential human traits such as feeling, compassion, empathy, pain and love. We risk teaching ourselves to be the kind of thing we are building, to treat speech as output, judgment as computation and persons as data. The idol does not have to come alive to diminish us. We only have to bow to it.

Second, Babel is a story about the concentration of power.

The builders' stated fear is being “scattered over the face of all the earth,” which is to say, their project is an act of forced centralization, one city, one name, one direction for everyone. The medieval commentator Nachmanides saw this clearly: Babel inverts the original blessing to spread out and fill the earth. The encyclical's alternative, Nehemiah's wall, is its opposite in structure as much as in spirit, not one tower under one name, but many gates, with each family responsible for its own section.

Here too, the Pope’s analogy lands with real force. The capacity to build advanced AI is concentrating with extraordinary speed: in effect, two governments, a half-dozen companies and a handful of individuals now hold most of the compute, capital and talent that will shape the technology, and through it, much of the economy, society and public square. No prior general-purpose technology has had its commanding heights held by so few. A single tower, with everyone's name subordinated to a very small number of names, is not a stable arrangement for a species.

Babel as the first biblical critique of empire: the attempt to impose one order, one language and one name on human plurality. On that reading, the emergence of distinct nations and tongues is not a curse but rather the moral architecture of creation. Plurality is not what went wrong after Babel; it is what was meant to be in the first place. The scattering, in other words, was not a punishment but a redirection, a refusal to let one order claim the whole future.

The instinct ran so deep it shaped the law itself: in the Sanhedrin, ancient Israel's high court, a unanimous guilty verdict in a capital case 

 the defendant rather than condemning him (Sanhedrin 17a). A court in which no one dissented was presumed to have stopped thinking, and its certainty was treated as a defect.

Law and democratic institutions, not engineers, should hold final authority over AI. But that authority should make us wary of the dream of a single global framework for AI, one ethical vocabulary, drawn largely from Western values,

imposed on a world whose needs and aspirations vary enormously.

The priorities for AI in India or across Africa are not Silicon Valley's. Europe is straining to reconcile its rights-driven instincts with the weight of its own regulatory regime. And the United States is in the midst of its own reckoning as accelerationists meet 

 from communities worried about lost jobs and environmental costs. That AI rules are now forming across jurisdictions, and that the nations, regulators and approaches behind them differ, is not regulatory failure. It may be our last safeguard against any one company, country, or self-annointed priesthood of engineers defining the human future for the rest of us.

Third, Babel is the story of a world that stopped making sense.

And yet plurality carries its own peril, the third and subtlest lesson of Babel. The scattering that protects us from one tower can also tip into something darker: a world so multiplied and complex that it stops making sense. If the sin of Babel was concentration, its punishment was incoherence, the moment shared meaning dissolved, cooperation gave way to chaos and no one could follow what anyone else was saying or building. Before the tower, everyone spoke one language; afterward, no one could understand anyone else. We tend to read this as a divine punishment for our hubris, but it is also a description of what happens when a system grows past the comprehension of the people inside it.

The biblical text says that God acted “so that one man could not understand his neighbor's speech.” The midrash Rashi 

 dramatizes what that actually looked like on the scaffolding: one builder would ask his partner for an axe; the partner, hearing the same sounds differently, would hand him a shovel instead (Genesis Rabbah 38:10). The worker, enraged, would attack him. Cooperation dissolves into violence the moment shared meaning is gone. This is the most underrated risk of building machines more capable than ourselves. The danger is not only misalignment, an AGI that pursues goals we never intended. It is also that the institutions, markets and infrastructures such systems design and run could become genuinely unintelligible to us: optimized, efficient, but completely opaque. You cannot explain the bond market to an ant. We are at risk of becoming the ants: living inside structures built for us by intelligences we cannot follow, in a language we no longer share. A world we cannot understand is a world we cannot govern, correct or meaningfully consent to. A world without due process, justice or (humanly legible) reason. The confusion of tongues would not be a curse imposed from above. It would be a side effect of our own ambition .

Pope Leo frames the choice as Babel or Jerusalem. The rabbis read the warning as yielding three lessons. Beware the project that values the brick above the man. Beware the tower that gathers every name into one. And beware the system that grows past our understanding. The builders at Shinar failed on all three counts, and the text has never let us forget it. We are about to learn whether we can build something nearer the heavens than anything before it without repeating their mistake. The oldest story we have already tells us how it goes if we do.

A woman is passing by the logo of the European Commission at the Berlaymont building in Brussels, Belgium, on Friday, 17 April 2026. (Photo by Marius Burgelman/Belga/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

 that it was joining W Social, a new European social media platform built on the AT Protocol, the move attracted attention as an apparent effort to align its communications strategy with its broader digital sovereignty agenda.

The announcement followed the Commission’s release of its 

, a set of legislative proposals to boost the bloc’s autonomy over its digital infrastructure, which includes support for decentralized open networks. Yet the move to W Social has also prompted criticism. Although W Social does not appear to meet the EU’s own Open Source Strategy, senior EU leaders — including European Commission President 

The episode raises broader questions about what "digital sovereignty" means in practice. In a 

 on tech sovereignty, the European Commission outlines that digital sovereignty is understood as the EU's capacity to exercise its independence in the digital domain, ensuring the EU retains its “ability to decide, invest, and innovate according to European values of democracy, openness, and the rule of law.” Acknowledging that Europe is highly dependent on US technology, the need for greater control over its digital infrastructure has been highlighted as a top priority for the EU.

The Commission’s Open Source Strategy outlines the ambition not only for Europe to wean itself off US Big Tech but also to pursue a different approach to European tech adoption, recognizing the benefits of a more open and distributed approach to tech adoption that avoids the pitfalls of vendor lock-in. However, its actions signal a pursuit of tech sovereignty which focuses only on where infrastructure is located, ignoring the need to also 

pursue sovereignty through openness, interoperability and user choice

Launched at the 2026 World Economic Forum

 as a for-profit European social platform governed by European law, hosted on European infrastructure, and "designed for conversations among humans around the world." The platform positions itself as a European alternative to X. Its principal distinguishing features are identity verification intended to reduce bots and its use of the AT Protocol, the decentralized networking protocol developed by Bluesky.

The company’s CEO and co-founder is Professor Anna Zeiter, previously a professor in Data Protection Law at the University of Bern with experience working at companies like Flo and eBay. Ingmar Rentzhog is the co-founder and sits on the board of W Social and is a co-founder and CEO of the media firm 

On the surface, its uptake by the European Commission is a positive sign that decision makers in Europe are signaling interest in moving away from platforms based in the US. Although the Commission already maintains a 

 — including operating its own server — it continues to rely heavily on commercial platforms such as X and LinkedIn for public communication. However, artist and open-network advocate 

 that W Social had removed its public GitHub repository, 

 from developers and open-source advocates, who viewed the move as inconsistent with the collaborative ethos of the AT Protocol ecosystem.

Understanding the criticism requires understanding the goals of the AT Protocol itself. Although often associated with the 

 by the Bluesky team as a shared infrastructure that allows multiple applications to interoperate rather than tying users to a single platform. This simplifies app creation for developers, who can build on top of an open protocol and plug straight into a network. Rather than competing against apps to concentrate all users on their individual platform, users can mix and match apps and components of apps without having to rebuild their accounts and networks of followers and friends.

 of the protocol is to facilitate the creation of an ecosystem of apps that users can easily move between or use in combination, which is diametrically opposed to the dominant model of centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are designed to lock in users. Going beyond enabling competing apps within the ecosystem, the protocol

 “to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system.” This means users control their feeds and how they are presented, and can pick their own content moderation services within the apps on the protocol. Though technical commentary has questioned the 

 to how decentralized from Bluesky the AT Protocol ecosystem can become, the AT Protocol was designed with “credible exit” in mind to avoid the pitfalls of remaining trapped within “

With openness at the heart of the project, major apps like the Bluesky social network and 

, a social networking organization that began as a custom feed on Bluesky centering black voices, have both open sourced their code, which is 

. Though it is not mandatory to open source its code, it is in keeping with the philosophy behind the protocol to do so. Indeed, openness has meant that developers are able to learn from each other.

For instance, Blacksky, which has grown from a custom feed to 

 a fully open source and decentralized stack of technologies for communities to build their own social networks, 

 to develop a similar European social networking infrastructure based on the AT Protocol. Sherif Elsayed-Ali, a co-lead for Eurosky, 

 that the team can build new apps quickly “because we’re building on open source foundations and years of work by others. We contribute back by open sourcing our work so others can use it. Open source is an incredible force multiplier.” This illustrates why it is significant that W Social has chosen to close its codebase; it directly contradicts the project of the AT Protocol. Because the company has chosen to close its GitHub repository, other developers cannot build on their work or build interoperable services with W Social.

Part of W Social’s pitch is to build a space where only verified humans can participate. For users who sign up for W Social or migrate their existing Bluesky accounts to W Social, their account is still viewable to those using other AT Protocol apps, but W Social 

 identity verification for posting, commenting, messaging, and interacting with users on the W Social platform and the feed is only viewable from the W Social app. To verify, users must use a separate app, W Identity, to scan either a passport or a national identity card, prompting 

However, this approach undermines the interoperability that the decentralization movement aims to achieve. The goal is to let users access networks through the apps or communities of their choice, mix and match feeds and algorithmic ranking, and customize content moderation to meet their needs. By building on the open protocol, W Social 

 the benefit of directly plugging into the entire existing network comprising over 

 users. However, critics say it is also attempting to draw users into a closed ecosystem. Elsayed-Ali 

 that while there are cases for closed community spaces to be built, public apps that position themselves as a public square “should not be gated.”

 that while repositories were previously publicly accessible, they were made private while “we reviewed security, privacy, licensing, intellectual property, documentation and commercial considerations.” They have said that they may again publish “selected components, improvements, integrations, bug fixes and technical documentation” in the future upon review. They reiterated a commitment to supporting open standards, interoperability and user choice, as well as contributing “responsibly” to the AT Protocol ecosystem, while balancing a need to build their own “secure, sustainable and distinctive service.”

However, by closing its codebase and attempting to shy away from the interoperability that the AT Protocol ecosystem was built to facilitate, it moves closer toward the model of the centralized platform, locking in users, denying user choice and control, the very issues that adopting open source and decentralized networks are supposed to fix. The mere fact that its servers are based in Europe is not sovereignty if users are denied control.

Online commentary on the Commission’s move to W Social has questioned why the agency has backed a closed source platform mere weeks after publishing its 

. The strategy outlines a set of recommendations by the Commission to support the adoption and development of open source technology, arguing that it can be a successful strategy for Europe to maintain control over its digital infrastructure. At the heart of the strategy is the pursuit of a digital ecosystem that is “interoperable, portable and based on the widespread adoption of open standards – to ensure that public and private users can choose, switch and scale technological solutions without prohibitive costs.” The open strategy includes tech throughout the entire stack, from cloud computing to social networking.

The strategy makes clear the benefits of open source, pointing out that it promotes secure and auditable digital infrastructure, enabling independent inspection and peer review, while also boosting competitiveness. Similar to the motivations behind the AT Protocol, the strategy points out that open source lowers the barriers to market entry, and reduces costs by fostering “collaborative innovation by enabling communities and companies to jointly develop, adapt and secure technologies.”

The strategy lays out objectives not only to “strengthen and promote a vibrant open source ecosystem” but also to promote and adopt “open and interoperable digital ecosystems for public administrations, including EU institutions.” Recognizing the Commission “as a major public administration and policymaker,” the strategy states that the administration will use and develop open source broadly, “contributing to a European open and sovereign digital ecosystem.”

Mastodon’s Executive Director, Felix Hlatky, told Tech Policy Press that “we believe the European Commission is making thoughtful decisions,” citing the Commission’s Mastodon server and the Tech Sovereignty Strategy as demonstrating “that they understand sovereignty isn’t just built at the server level but throughout the entire technology stack.”

However, Sebastian Vogelsang, a co-lead at Eurosky, 

 to the Commission’s adoption of a closed-source app with "surprise," given the aims outlined in the strategy to support open source. He also 

 that in a recent workshop on the future of social media, researchers from the Commission’s Joint Research Center had “presented recent work highlighting the importance of open social media infrastructure and specifically referenced initiatives such as Eurosky”, further adding confusion to the decision to migrate to W Social.

Nicholas Gates, Senior Policy Advisor at OpenForum Europe, told Tech Policy Press that “this decision doesn’t reflect well on the Open Source Strategy.” “There is a need to have the right principles beyond just seeing that this is built on an open protocol. It also shows some of the contradictions inherent in implementing a strategy like this and reveals some of the underlying friction in implementing an Open Source Strategy in such a large bureaucracy.” Gates, however, does not think that this decision dooms the strategy as a whole, but it shows that implementation is going to be uneven at times.

Jean Cattan, the Future of Technology Institute’s Of Counsel, warned that the European Commission’s policy choice could risk favoring closed solutions and signals “a narrow pursuit of digital power.” He warned that the Commission should protect its aspirations of an open, distributed, and shared digital economy, arguing that “we should redirect momentum toward genuine market openness rather than a race for power that would run counter to the founding principles at stake.” Aline Blankertz, co-founder of the digital-policy collective Structural Integrity, similarly added that the Commission’s pick of W Social “illustrates the Commission's interpretation of sovereignty: European companies should imitate the principles of US companies instead of building on principles that structurally limit dependencies.”

This may be the first stress test for the AT Protocol, one that tests how well centralization resistance is built into the protocol’s structure. Bluesky’s 

, “the organization is a future adversary" articulates the project of the AT Protocol to ensure that users “

 pack their bags (take all of their data and relationships with them) and move to a different server.” Infrastructurally, users cannot be locked in. W Social may become the protocol's first significant test of that premise.

The question is not simply whether users can leave the platform, but whether Europe's digital sovereignty agenda will ultimately favor infrastructure that keeps exit possible or platforms that seek to recreate familiar forms of enclosure under European ownership. Will the Commission proceed to pursue an open source strategy that recognizes the benefits of a distributed approach to tech adoption and avoids the pitfalls of vendor lock-in, or one that settles for sovereignty based on server location?

request for comment by Tech Policy Press.

When India launched Aadhaar in 2009, it was presented as a home-grown achievement — a 

proudly sovereign digital identity solution

 that would allow the country to chart its own technological future, free from dependence on American and Chinese technology firms. As part of its broader digital transformation, India positioned Aadhaar as evidence that digital infrastructure could serve the public interest rather than private, often foreign, corporations.

, making it the world’s largest biometric identification system. What is rarely acknowledged, though, is that this feat would not have been possible without the involvement of 

, a Japanese multinational information and technology company that supplied the fingerprint extraction and matching system at the core of Aadhaar.

NEC's role is significant not because Japan poses the same geopolitical concerns as the United States or China, but because it reveals a broader blind spot in how digital sovereignty is understood.

Discussions of Aadhaar and India's Digital Public Infrastructure have largely overlooked the role Japanese companies played in building its foundational identity layer. This omission reflects a broader problem with contemporary debates on digital sovereignty. Increasingly invoked by India, the 

 as a response to dependence on American and Chinese technology firms, digital sovereignty has become less about eliminating dependency than about choosing among competing foreign partners. In the process, questions of democratic accountability risk being displaced by geopolitical calculations.

Japan occupies a markedly different place in India’s strategic imagination, suggesting that concerns about digital sovereignty may be selectively invoked against certain geopolitical competitors. Not only has Japan maintained strong bilateral relations with India in recent years, but it also benefits from the absence of colonial baggage. 

, an independent researcher who has extensively reported on India’s tech policy, notes: “India does not want to source any critical infrastructure, from CCTVs to biometric sensors, from China. Japan provides us with an alternative which is considered a win-win geopolitically and economically.”

The question is not whether Japanese dependencies are inherently better, but rather what accountability governs the dependencies that are chosen and why some suppliers might escape scrutiny altogether.

Japan’s NEC and its role in India’s Aadhaar

Japanese technology firms play a far more influential role than is currently acknowledged. According to 

 published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, NEC is the largest non-Chinese and non-American supplier of AI surveillance technology, operating in at least 

 around the world. Long before Aadhaar, NEC had supplied fingerprint identification systems to police agencies in the United States and to 

, establishing itself as one of the world's leading biometric providers.

NEC's biometric systems are widely regarded as technically sophisticated. In 

 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), its fingerprint recognition system achieved exceptionally low error rates. Yet field performance appears considerably weaker. In India, Aadhaar authentication success rates have been reported at roughly 

, translating into millions of failed authentication attempts each month.

These discrepancies raise questions not only about technical performance but also about who bears responsibility when failures affect access to essential services.

With an accuracy rate of over 90%, the technology may seem 

 but in absolute numbers, this amounts to more than 20 million failed attempts per month. In 2018, when asked about the 

 experienced in rural parts of India, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) sidestepped accountability by presenting itself as merely a vessel within the welfare pipeline. NEC, of course, has yet to address this discrepancy, let alone be subject to public scrutiny, largely because they continue to operate behind the scenes.

The structural gap in the sovereignty debate

In India’s case, there is a constellation of factors that together produce a structural gap in accountability that allows actors outside the dominant geopolitical frame to operate with minimal scrutiny. This gap emerges from three intersecting forces: colonial anxiety, 

Colonial anxiety has been at the heart of India’s geopolitical considerations. 

, for instance, has long been regarded by former colonies as a crucial prerequisite for achieving genuine political and economic sovereignty. In India, there is a degree of skepticism toward American technology firms, which can be exemplified by IBM’s aggressive penetration of the newly decolonized Indian market that stifled the development of the local computing industry, and, in turn, constrained its broader economic growth. Since 2018, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has taken stringent measures to curb the growing dominance of American tech firms in the country, citing concerns that India could be “

conquered by colonial powers all over again

These colonial anxieties over unfavorable dependencies have since fueled the BJP’s Hindu nationalist self-reliance doctrine. Launched in 2020, Atmanirbhar Bharat, or the self-reliant India initiative, has been an attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to 

 to align with India’s national development plans by unshackling the country from exploitative global supply chains and becoming a manufacturing hub where business is done on the country’s own terms. Dependencies on Chinese imports played a significant role in these debates. Following increased border tensions between India and China in 2020, the BJP identified India’s heavy dependency on 

 as a threatening force against its independence, which led to the country asserting its sovereignty against its more powerful global counterpart by 

Together, this has driven the demand to achieve digital independence from the two most visible rivals, the US and China. This positions India to 

 against the dominant US-China rivalry. India immensely benefits from this: it allows the country, as a middle power, to assert its autonomy while leveraging the two economic powerhouses when needed.

The same sovereignty doctrine that positioned India against the US and China created the conditions under which a firm like NEC could operate without equivalent scrutiny.

Digital sovereignty beyond US-China polarization

The problem is not NEC specifically. It is the fact that digital sovereignty, in its current form, operates less as a mechanism of democratic accountability and more as a process of substituting one set of dependencies for another, mostly driven by geopolitical and national interests.

While digital sovereignty is increasingly being mobilized as a solution to the ailments of 

, digital sovereignty in the form of self-determination and technological independence over a select few geopolitical rivals must not be mistaken for a pathway to 

Choosing your dependencies is not the same as controlling them.

Over the coming weeks, there will be no shortage of analysis of the contents and priorities put forward by the 

UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence (IISPAI) Preliminary Report

. Yet, the report leaves unresolved a prior and more fundamental question: the nature of its independence, or more accurately, how that independence is understood, secured and demonstrated. Independence is what gives the Panel its value. Without it, it is hard to distinguish the Panel from the many interest groups already vying for space in AI governance.

This independence here has two faces, and neither the report nor the documents related to the organization of the Panel address either one. The first is independence from industry. The second, and the more classic for a body of this kind, is independence from states. The IISPAI was established by a 

, its members nominated through a Secretary-General shortlist and appointed by Member States, and its reports are timed to feed the Global Dialogue on AI Governance on a political calendar the Panel does not control. A comparison with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is instructive: its sharpest independence problem is not funding but its Summary for Policymakers, 

 line by line. Whether IISPAI outputs face comparable state filtering, or whether the Panel even sets its own agenda, is unclear. For a body whose value rests on standing apart from the interests it assesses, these are first-order questions, not procedural detail.

As a first report, one would expect the mechanisms that secure independence to be set out clearly in the document: how content is determined when no consensus exists, and how donor funding and individual members’ interests are disclosed and managed. Members serve in a personal capacity, and the funders are named: the governments of Germany, Japan and Spain, and the Omidyar Network Fund. But naming donors is not the same as managing their influence. There are no amounts, no split between financial and in-kind support, no conditions, and no declarations of individual members' interests. To be clear, this is not evidence of capture, but it is precisely why individual, itemized transparency is needed, rather than acknowledgement alone. The implicit request is that the public should trust the IISPAI as scientists. The 

, where trust and credibility had to be earned through transparency rather than assumed, shows why that is not enough.

The panel reproduces a weakness it identifies elsewhere: a lack of consensus and transparency. Its mandate is explicitly to document scientific consensus and disagreements, yet the report presents a smoothed broad consensus noting only that "no member endorses every point". Disagreement is to be expected in a body of forty experts across disciplines and regions, not a defect to be managed away. The value of an independent scientific panel lies precisely in making contested understandings visible, engaging a broad range of stakeholders on how to navigate them. These tensions are what the panel should foreground.

The same tension runs through the evidence itself. The report rightly warns that many safety assessments are conducted by the developers building the systems, yet its own capability claims rest heavily on developer-produced and developer-adjacent evidence, from benchmark scores to forecasts such as the estimated doubling time of the tasks agentic systems can complete. A panel cannot flag developer self-assessment as a structural weakness and then rely on that same evidence base without stating how it corrects for it. Independence is not only about who sits on the Panel and who funds it, but of whose evidence is admitted and how its provenance is weighed.

This also matters for how priorities are set. It is unclear why the report foregrounds frontier AI and catastrophic risk, while the distributed harms and structural inequalities of existing AI systems receive much thinner treatment. These emphases mirror the research agendas of some of the Panel's most prominent members. The concern is not the integrity of these members, which we do not doubt, but method: without a transparent account of how topics were selected and ranked, readers can not tell whether prominence reflects a considered judgement of salience or the composition of the Panel. Where a report shapes a global agenda, the ranking of priorities should itself be explained and open to scrutiny.

It is also unclear why the report focuses on the inadequacy of largely untested governance frameworks, rather than building on instruments that are already in operation, such as the

UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence

China's binding rules on algorithms and generative AI

. By casting existing governance mechanisms as unfit for frontier models, the report obscures the value of existing regulation and risks pushing states towards reckless, discretionary interventions, as in June 2026 when a US Department of Commerce 

 compelled Anthropic to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models worldwide, an 18-day suspension imposed and then 

through executive discretion rather than any statutory process.

Some of these tensions surface when reading the report. AI is presented as a solution to the most pressing societal challenges, yet the report also argues that significant societal transformation is required in order to enable these solutions. Essentially, we are expected to work for AI rather than AI for us. The point is sharpened by the acknowledgement that current AI models are trained and optimized for only a very small number of the world's approximately 7,000 languages, leaving much of the world's population expected to adapt to systems that do not serve their own languages or cultural contexts.

The report has real strengths. It recognizes the structural concentration of AI power and insists that AI is neither inherently good nor bad, its outcomes depending on human and institutional choices. This recognition is what makes the independence issue awkward: a body that warns about the concentration of AI power in a handful of advanced economies and firms, and about the exclusion of the Global South, is underwritten by three high-income governments and a private fund rooted in technology-sector wealth.

Declarations of interest are standard in other international scientific committees. Measures adopted range from full transparency with searchable databases on individual members’ disclosure forms (

), to disclosure of members’ interests ahead of meetings and reports (

) to confidential individual disclosure reviewed by a standing committee (

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

). Given the report's own acknowledgement of the risks of concentrated power, the individually itemized end of this spectrum is the most prudent and the most in line with the IISPAI's mandate.

In sum, we propose that the Panel adopt at least the following procedures and disclosures. These recommendations are addressed to different actors. The first three lie within the Panel's own remit; the last two rest with the Member States and the UN Secretariat that established and support it, and are no less essential.

Publish a clear methodology for reaching conclusions.

 Set out how evidence is assessed, how priorities are selected, and how decisions are made when members disagree. This should explain how minority positions are handled and what threshold constitutes consensus.

Increase transparency of the deliberative process.

 Document and publish the process by which the report is developed, including meeting summaries, records of deliberation, evidence submissions, and responses to expert feedback.

Make disagreement visible rather than smoothing it over.

 Where consensus does not exist, present competing scientific perspectives and the basis for each, rather than presenting contested issues as settled. Use calibrated confidence and uncertainty language so that the strength of evidence behind each position is legible.

Strengthen the management of interests and funding, not just their disclosure.

 Publish comprehensive declarations of interests for all panel members, disclose all funding sources and donor relationships, including amounts and conditions. Disclosure alone is insufficient: establish the architecture that makes it meaningful, a standing conflict-of-interest committee with recusal rules and attention to balance in author teams. Individual-level transparency is necessary to avoid accusations of undue industry influence.

5. Insulate the Panel structurally, not only through disclosure.

 Fund the Panel through ring-fenced or pooled contributions rather than earmarked national donations, so that no single government's support maps onto specific outputs, and establish a clear firewall between the Panel's scientific work and its secretariat, which currently sits within the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, a body with its own policy mandate. Transparency reveals influence; structural separation is what limits it.

Disclosure: One of the authors (Virginia Dignum) was a member of the United Nations High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence (2023–2024), whose report “

” recommended the creation of the body assessed in this piece. The views expressed are the authors' own. Work at the 

 is supported by multiple grants from the European Union and the Wallenberg Foundation across diverse projects.

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