Open problem 11
The Global Justice and Benefit-Sharing Problem
- current AI
- frontier AI
- AGI
- post-AGI
What obligations do AI-leading states and firms have to share benefits, reduce harms, provide access, transfer capacity, include affected publics, and avoid locking poorer countries into dependency?
Why it’s foundational
AI governance often treats “global” as a legitimacy word while key decisions remain concentrated in a few firms and states. If AGI is transformative, distributional questions are not secondary; they are constitutive.
Why it’s difficult
Safety and access can conflict. Open access may empower innovation and misuse. Compute-sharing may support development but deepen dependency. Global inclusion is hard when many countries lack regulatory capacity, technical expertise, or bargaining power.
Hidden assumptions
“Inclusion” is often reduced to consultation. That is inadequate. Voice without power, capacity, or agenda-setting authority is not meaningful governance.
Competing positions
- Global public-goods framing
- National strategic advantage
- Market diffusion
- Decolonial/data-justice approaches
- Capacity-building
- Compute commons
- Benefit-sharing funds
- Sovereign AI strategies
What could make progress
Distributional impact studies; institutional design for global AI funds; compute-access pilots; analysis of data extraction and labour supply chains; participatory governance experiments with affected communities; evaluation of capacity-building programmes.
What it would change
It would influence compute allocation, public procurement, IP policy, data governance, development finance, standards participation, and international representation.
Sub-agenda
- What would fair access to frontier AI actually mean?
- Should compute be treated as development infrastructure?
- How can safety controls avoid entrenching incumbent states and firms?
- What rights should data-producing communities have?
- How should AGI benefits be taxed, shared, or publicly owned?
Priority (editor scoring)
Normatively central and neglected, but often underspecified institutionally.
- Importance
- 4/5
- Neglected
- 5/5
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Actionable
- 3/5
- Robust
- 5/5
- Nat’l+int’l
- 5/5
Where the catalog bears on this
No current catalog instrument resolves this puzzle — which is the point: it is a foundational question the existing rules leave open. Browse the coverage catalog for what the instruments do and don’t say.
Editorial content — a human-authored agenda question, rendered verbatim. No part of this analysis is AI-generated (see the charter).