The world’s first global scientific body dedicated to artificial intelligence is preparing for its inaugural in-person meeting. The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, whose 40 members were formally appointed by the General Assembly in February, is charged with producing annual evidence-based assessments of how AI is transforming economies, societies and governments, without prescribing policy or setting rules.

The panel was born of growing anxiety within the UN system about the risks of ungoverned AI. In September 2025, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council that “humanity’s fate cannot be left to an algorithm.” Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned in February that developers building AI models without grounding in social and ethical principles risk creating something monstrous.

One of the panel’s founding members, Menna El-Assady, an assistant professor at ETH Zurich, argues that the framing of AI as a threat to human agency misses an opportunity. At ETH, she has developed the concept of “augmented intelligence,” designing AI to enhance rather than replace human capabilities, and studying what she calls the “co-adaptation loop,” the dynamic by which humans and AI systems evolve in response to one another. “We are not just focusing on AI as a mathematical or algorithmic field,” she said. “We are also looking at ensuring that humans are central to decision-making.”

Her concerns extend to the unequal distribution of AI’s benefits. She advocates for a public digital infrastructure that would give any developer, anywhere, access to the tools needed to build AI systems. She also calls for AI models to incorporate a wider range of languages and cultures, so that the technology’s benefits are not concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations.

On the question of trust and transparency, one mechanism under discussion is “AI watermarking,” which would make it possible to determine whether any given piece of content was produced by a human or generated by a machine. The panel’s first formal report is due to be presented at the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on July 6th and 7th.

Sources: UN News; ETH Zurich; UN Secretary-General’s Office.