A United World Leaders Initiative
The Opportunity
Artificial intelligence may become one of the most consequential technologies in human history. It offers extraordinary potential to accelerate scientific discovery, expand economic opportunity, improve education and healthcare, strengthen governments, and help address challenges previously considered unsolvable.
At the same time, leading AI organizations themselves have publicly recognized that increasingly capable AI systems can create serious and potentially catastrophic risks requiring safeguards, international cooperation, and new approaches to governance.
The question is therefore not simply how rapidly humanity can advance artificial intelligence. It is how the world’s most influential leaders can work together to ensure that AI advances humanity while its most serious risks are responsibly addressed.
The Global AI & Humanity Initiative is an invitation to exceptional leaders and key stakeholders in artificial intelligence, technology, government, science, and investment to come together at a critical moment—helping shape an international effort that could have profound implications for generations to come.
Why an Independent Global Leadership Platform Is Needed
The challenge is not simply identifying the problem. It is creating a platform capable of bringing the necessary parties together.
If one major AI company attempts to lead such an effort, competing companies may understandably question whether commercial interests influence the agenda.
If one government leads it, other governments—particularly strategic competitors—may be reluctant to participate fully or may view the initiative through a geopolitical lens.
At the same time, an initiative addressing an issue of this magnitude should not depend upon the approval of any single nation, political bloc, corporation, or other stakeholder. No individual participant should be able to prevent meaningful cooperation among those prepared to move forward.
This is precisely the type of challenge for which United World Leaders was created: to provide an independent, nonpartisan global leadership platform capable of bringing together extraordinary leaders across governments, business, science, investment, academia, and other sectors around matters that transcend national, political, and commercial boundaries.
United World Leaders is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit organization bringing together distinguished leaders and institutions to advance meaningful and lasting positive impact, socioeconomic prosperity, international cooperation, and peace.
The Initiative does not seek to replace governments, international institutions, or existing AI safety and governance efforts. Rather, it provides an additional neutral platform through which their leaders can engage one another, develop relationships and strategies, and pursue areas of cooperation that might otherwise be difficult to advance.
An Invitation to Founding Leaders and Key Stakeholders
The Global AI & Humanity Initiative invites a select group of distinguished leaders from the artificial intelligence, technology, government, scientific, and investment communities to participate in, help shape, and potentially co-lead this global effort.
The principal leadership group is intended to remain intentionally small and senior.
Potential participants include:
- founders, CEOs, and senior leaders of the world’s leading AI and technology companies;
- heads of government and senior government leaders responsible for AI, technology, science, economic development, and national strategy;
- leading AI scientists and researchers;
- major investors and capital providers shaping the development of artificial intelligence; and
- other exceptional leaders whose expertise or global standing can materially contribute to the Initiative.
Importantly, the Initiative seeks meaningful participation across the world’s major technological and geopolitical centers. This includes leaders, governments, companies, scientists, and other relevant institutions from the United States, China, Russia, Europe, and other nations and regions playing important roles in the development, deployment, governance, and future of artificial intelligence.
The objective is to create an environment where geopolitical competitors and commercial competitors can engage around areas of shared global importance without requiring any participant to surrender its legitimate national or commercial interests.
Founding leaders would have an opportunity to help shape the Initiative from its earliest stage, identify priorities, invite other exceptional leaders and institutions to participate, establish specialized working groups where appropriate, and help determine what meaningful international outcomes should be pursued.
The objective is not to create another organization that merely discusses artificial intelligence.
It is to create a high-level global table where the individuals actually developing, financing, governing, and shaping the future of AI can engage one another directly.
A Peer-Level Global Leadership Platform
For participating executives and government leaders, the proposition is straightforward.
United World Leaders provides the platform and institutional infrastructure. Leaders provide their experience, relationships, judgment, and leadership.
Participation is designed not to create unnecessary administrative burdens or require senior executives to manage numerous ancillary programs.
The principal value is access to a highly selective peer-level environment through which leaders can engage directly with leaders of other major AI companies and institutions; develop relationships with senior government decision-makers internationally; identify areas where competitors can cooperate without compromising legitimate commercial interests; discuss emerging risks before they become international crises; contribute technical realities to policy discussions; explore responsible international AI deployment; and help shape longer-term national and international frameworks.
Potential Areas of Work
The precise agenda should ultimately be shaped by the Initiative’s founding leadership rather than predetermined by United World Leaders.
Areas for consideration could include frontier AI safety and security; responsible development and deployment; international approaches to advanced AI governance; model evaluation and safeguards; cybersecurity and misuse; preparedness for emerging AI capabilities; responsible innovation; international scientific cooperation; economic transformation; workforce and education implications; and mechanisms for rapidly convening leaders when significant new AI capabilities, incidents, or international concerns emerge.
Where sufficient agreement develops, the Initiative could also facilitate the development of voluntary principles, model policies, international frameworks, government-to-government cooperation, industry commitments, or ultimately concepts that participating governments may choose to advance through appropriate international mechanisms.
AI for Global Prosperity
The Initiative should be equally focused on what humanity can gain from artificial intelligence.
Through United World Leaders’ economic and national development initiatives, participating AI companies, investors, and other institutions could be connected with governments seeking to responsibly use AI to advance economic development, education, healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, entrepreneurship, government services, scientific research, and other national priorities.
This creates an important additional proposition for industry participants: participation is not simply about discussing restrictions or risks. It can also create pathways for responsible international deployment, relationships with governments, new development partnerships, and opportunities to demonstrate how advanced AI can materially improve people’s lives.
Safety and progress therefore should not be presented as competing objectives. The ambition is to advance both.
The Broader United World Leaders Ecosystem
Importantly, founding leaders would not be expected to personally manage every broader engagement described below. These are additional opportunities and platforms available to support the Initiative and its leadership.
The Initiative could utilize the United World Leaders Policy Institute as a platform to engage academics, policy organizations, researchers, universities, think tanks, and other experts whose existing work and expertise could contribute to the Initiative’s objectives and broader policy dialogue.
Young United World Leaders and United World Leaders’ relationships with youth-focused organizations internationally could provide opportunities, when appropriate, for future generations to contribute their perspectives to an issue that will profoundly affect their lives.
United World Leaders’ broader network of distinguished scientific, academic, diplomatic, governmental, philanthropic, and other leaders—including relevant initiatives bringing together exceptional intellectual and global leadership—could provide additional expertise and relationships when useful.
United World Leaders Impact & Legacy events, campus engagements, publications, interviews, and international media relationships could broaden responsible public discussion and improve understanding of both AI’s extraordinary potential and its legitimate risks.
United World Leaders could also facilitate strategic relationships with governments, institutions, philanthropic organizations, and other stakeholders where those relationships advance the Initiative’s objectives.
These capabilities remain available to the Initiative as supporting infrastructure—not additional obligations placed upon its senior leaders.
Independent, Nonpartisan and Global
The Global AI & Humanity Initiative is deliberately independent of political ideology and geopolitical alignment.
It is not East versus West, government versus industry, innovation versus regulation, or one political philosophy versus another.
Its premise is much simpler:
Artificial intelligence is becoming too consequential for humanity for its future to be shaped exclusively within individual corporate boardrooms, national capitals, or competing geopolitical blocs.
The people with the knowledge, authority, resources, and ability to influence that future need a trusted environment in which they can engage one another.
No single company should control that table.
No single government should control that table.
And no single participant should be able to prevent others from cooperating when meaningful progress is possible.
United World Leaders can provide that table.
Impact & Legacy
For the individuals invited to establish and participate in this Initiative, the opportunity extends beyond another board appointment, conference, or advisory position.
They have the opportunity to help build an international leadership platform around an issue that may shape civilization for generations.
Participants can invite other extraordinary leaders to join them, create new relationships across traditional commercial and geopolitical boundaries, help governments and industry understand one another, advance practical solutions, and potentially contribute to frameworks that endure long after today’s individual technologies and companies have changed.
There are relatively few moments when leaders have the opportunity not merely to participate in history, but to help establish the institutions and relationships through which history is shaped.
Artificial intelligence may represent such a moment.
The Global AI & Humanity Initiative is an opportunity for exceptional leaders to meet that moment together—and to help ensure that one of humanity’s most powerful technological achievements ultimately serves humanity.
Invitation to Participate
United World Leaders welcomes expressions of interest from distinguished leaders, organizations, governments, AI and technology companies, investors, scientists, and other key stakeholders interested in participating in, supporting, or helping lead the Global AI & Humanity Initiative.
Those interested in exploring participation, leadership, strategic collaboration, or support are invited to contact: