This year marks the first time the summit is being held in the Global South, raising expectations for countries like Brazil. The Brazilian government is expected to send a large delegation, including representatives from the Ministries of Science and Technology, Health, Education, Communications, Foreign Affairs, and Management. 

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will also attend during his state visit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi — a move that could influence South-South positioning on related topics.

All previous AI summits have been marked by low institutionalization and a lack of concrete outcomes, creating significant uncertainty even among participants. The agenda does not provide clear mechanisms for nonstate participation, limiting the effective engagement of civil society and academia in the debates or in the text to be negotiated as the event’s final declaration. The private sector generally enjoys greater leeway, as it sponsors much of the event, raising concerns about transparency and influence.

As a result, much of global civil society and academic institutions organize parallel events, in which they have greater autonomy to shape the agenda. The aim is not only to critically debate issues related to AI governance and how different regions and communities are affected by this technology, but also to collectively consolidate positions and engage government representatives in these discussions so they can listen, participate and, ideally, bring these considerations to the negotiating table.

Data Privacy Brasil, as part of the Global South Alliance, is expected to participate in some of these events. (All events organized by alliance members are listed here.) Among our main expectations for this edition are:

Greater coordination with ongoing initiatives for global AI governance, such as the UN Independent Scientific Panel and the Global Dialogue, whose first session is expected to take place in July;
Revising the understanding of “AI safety” so that it addresses the impacts of AI already unfolding, not only potential risks, and includes a broader discussion around “AI red lines”;
A debate on data governance that considers data’s public value and how the benefits of its processing are returned to the population.

Civil society discussions ahead of the summit have also stressed the need to interpret safety as a sociotechnical concept — one that encompasses structural and already observable harms — and to create more meaningful avenues for dialogue with governmental delegations, particularly from the Global South, given the limited opportunities to participate in or influence outcomes.

Overall, we hope the summit can address these and other issues from a Global South perspective. To quote last year’s BRICS Declaration on the Global Governance of AI: “The proliferation of governance initiatives and the diverging views in multilateral coordination at the international level may aggravate existing asymmetries and the legitimacy gap of global governance on digital matters.” 

Since India is hosting and Brazil is actively engaged, we can expect some convergence toward reducing asymmetries.

 

This text was originally published in the newsletter of The Brazilian Report.

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