Mandate of the Constituent Assembly (IAIDA)
While the governance structure and statute of the envisioned IGO cannot be pre-designed, as they'll be the outcome for envisioned Constituent Assembly, it is of paramount importance that the Mandate of such an assembly is fitting for the kind of organization that is needed.
The resulting IGO should be properly empowered and resourced, to realize and equitably share the most advanced and safe AI, and reliably ban unsafe ones.
It should and highly federal, neutral, resilient, participatory, democratic, decentralized with highly effective checks and balances, and safeguards from degeneration or undue concentration of power. To ensure it is bold and participatory enough, its name could be derived from the International Atomic Development Authority, the IGO envisioned by the Baruch Plan for nuclear technology, and so therefore be called the International AI Development Authority (or IAIDA).
Why are comprehensive preliminary designs of such an IGO needed? While the statute and governance of such IGO will be the result of the specific design and context under which such an Open Transnational Constituent Assembly will be held, preliminary and comprehensive designs should be proposed and discussed to encourage substantive discussions and negotiations before and during such assembly. Given the absence of a comprehensive proposal, with the partial exception of a paper last of July 2023 by Google Deepmind and other researcher, we have taken it upon ourselves to create one below.
Why should we have a single IGO for AI? Given the unique nature and scope of the challenge ahead, it is unfitting to see explore models for global AI governance - such as an "IAEA for AI", an Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change for AI, a CERN for AI, or an "International Civil Aviation Organization for AI", or a "global AI lab" - as alternative one to the other, as all of them are needed.
Each of such new IGOs for AI would have significant interdependencies, so the analysis of state's advantage in participating in one IGO must be assessed in relation to its participation in other IGOs. For example, the participation of states in the IAEA, with its commitments to non-proliferation and submittal stringent oversight, was largely achieved by offering access and technical support for harnessing advanced nuclear energy technology.
Separate Agencies? Given the inherently global nature of those threats and opportunities, the scope of those organizations will necessarily need to include: (1) setting of globally-trusted AI safety standards; (2) development of world-leading safe AI and AI safety capabilities; (3) enforcement of global bans for unsafe AI development and use; and (4) development globally-trusted governance-support systems.
We provisionally group the required functions in three agencies of a single IGO:
(1) An AI Safety Agency will set global safety standards and enforce a ban on all development, training, deployment and research of dangerous AI worldwide to sufficiently mitigate the risk of loss of control or severe abuse by irresponsible or malicious state or non-state entities.
(2) A Global Public Benefit AI Lab will achieve and sustain a solid global decentralized leadership or co-leadership in human-controllable AI capability, technical alignment research and AI safety measures. It accrues capabilities and resources of member states and distributes dividends and control to member states and directly to its citizens, all the while stimulating and safeguarding private initiatives for innovation and oversight.
(3) An IT Security Agency will develop and certify radically more trustworthy and widely-trusted AI governance-support systems, particularly for confidential and diplomatic communications, for control subsystems for frontier AIs and other critical societal infrastructure, such as social media.
Far from being a fixed blueprint, such a proposal aims to fill a glaring gap in the availability of detailed and comprehensive proposals. It aims to stimulate the production of other similarly comprehensive proposals to foster concrete, cogent, transparent, efficient and timely negotiations among nations, leading up to such an Open Transnational Constituent Assembly for AI and Digital Communications, and eventually arrive soon at single-text procedure negotiations.