AI for Good Global Summit 2026

7–10 July 2026 · Palexpo, Geneva
Dates
7–10 July 2026
Location
Palexpo, Geneva, Switzerland
Host
ITU (International Telecommunication Union), with 50+ UN partners, co-convened with Switzerland
Theme
“Unlock AI's potential to serve humanity”

About

The AI for Good Global Summit is ITU's flagship gathering on applying artificial intelligence to the Sustainable Development Goals. It draws thousands of participants (governments, UN agencies, researchers, companies, and civil society) from around 170 countries.

It anchors a wider Geneva “AI week” in July 2026, running alongside the WSIS Forum and immediately after the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance.

What we're watching

What to expect

How to follow it

Note on watching remotely: for 2026 the summit uses a paid-registration model and does not offer a general public livestream. Sessions on the main stages are recorded and published after the event on the AI for Good YouTube channel and the summit's “Neural Network” platform. Real-time viewing is for in-person attendees.

If you want to follow along live, the two co-located UN tracks (the Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the WSIS Forum) are more openly webcast; AI for Good content is best caught on demand afterward.

The summit in brief

The 2026 summit (7–10 July) opened with the launch of the AI for Good Global Commission, a body of more than 40 founding members co-chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Salesforce chair Marc Benioff, with ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin as vice-chair. It seats heads of state (Estonia, Iceland, Kazakhstan) alongside the executives of the firms building the technology (Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Microsoft, Nvidia), with a mandate to widen access, strengthen trust and accelerate impact. African representation runs through it, with the African Union seated alongside Namibia, Nigeria and Togo. Whether a commission that mixes governments and the largest AI companies can hold both to account is the open question SDGCounting will be watching.

Pope Leo XIV, in a message to the summit read by Cardinal Pietro Parolin: the Holy See used the occasion to present the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI, urging leaders to confront the misuse of algorithms and the loss of human agency and to keep the dignity of every person at the center of the technology.

Switzerland also used the week to announce that Geneva will host a recurring World Summit on AI from 2027, positioning the city as the standing venue where the AI-and-development agenda is negotiated.

The summit drew its largest audience yet, with organisers and press reporting more than 12,000 participants from 170 countries. Much of the week ran through its competition tracks: Nearpays won the Innovation Factory, with will.i.am announcing additional funding for all three finalists; Plastic Erosion took the AI for Good Film Festival; the Robotics for Good Youth Challenge brought roughly 250 children to the venue; and the third day opened with International Girls in ICT Day. The exhibition floor carried the summit’s assistive technology case, from brain-computer interfaces to a $4,000 robotic guide dog shown by China Mobile.

The most consequential thing the summit produced was also the least photogenic. On 9 July the ITU announced a Focus Group on Trust and Identity for Humans and Agentic AI, a standards-track body addressing what happens when AI stops advising and starts acting: agents that impersonate a person or an organisation, or that take unauthorised actions across connected systems. It will write the terminology, reference architectures, trust frameworks and interoperability mechanisms, with the explicit aim of preserving meaningful human control over things like financial transactions and critical infrastructure. Co-chaired by Debora Comparin and Amir Banifatemi, it reports to ITU-T Study Group 17 and meets first in Paris in November 2026, then Geneva in January 2027.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU Secretary-General: “The future of AI depends on trust. As AI becomes more autonomous, we need to work together across industry, governments, academia and civil society to ensure the greatest possible confidence in AI systems.”

This is where the summit’s week connects to the rest of Geneva’s. The Global Dialogue on AI Governance set the political frame for who governs AI. A focus group on agent identity is the unglamorous machinery that decides whether any of it is enforceable, because a rule that cannot establish which agent acted, on whose authority, is not a rule.

The summit closed on 10 July, with ITU framing the final day around women’s leadership, education and human progress.

This section draws on press coverage of the summit rather than our own session transcripts, because the summit does not stream publicly and publishes no official transcripts. Attendance figures are as reported by organisers and press. Primary sources are linked under Key links below.

Who gets paid for the training data

The sharpest economic argument of the week came from the music track, in a session ITU billed as “The Sound of Intelligence,” featuring John Legend alongside executives from Universal Music, Stability AI and Nvidia. Its most consequential contribution came from Björn Ulvaeus, the ABBA co-founder who now presides over CISAC, the global confederation of authors’ societies. His move was to reject the terms on which the copyright fight has been conducted.

The industry has spent three years arguing about outputs, trying to trace whether a generated song copies a particular recording. Ulvaeus argued that this was always the wrong question, because a model does not copy songs, it produces a new synthesis of everything it absorbed. If the output cannot be traced back, the claim has to be made at the other end, on the input.

Björn Ulvaeus, President of CISAC: “Our works went in. We should be paid for what went in, not for every output that comes out the other end, but for the raw material that made the machine what it is.”
Our read: This is a counting problem wearing a copyright costume, and it belongs on the same page as the summit’s opening keynote. That keynote argued AI answers a maternal-health question worse in Kiswahili because the language is thin in the training data. Ulvaeus is arguing that whoever supplied the training data should be paid for it. Both claims run on the same premise: the training set is a ledger, and almost nobody is auditing what is in it or who put it there. Until the input layer is measured, neither the harm nor the payment can be allocated.

Session coverage

The summit does not stream publicly and publishes no official transcripts. These summaries are built from the recorded sessions posted afterwards, so they arrive later than our coverage of the webcast UN events, and quotations are close paraphrase from machine transcription.

7 July · Global Stage panel

Can AI help solve global crises?

Two UN principals disagree over whether AI can move the SDGs by 2030, and the panel converges on counting things on the ground.

Read summary → 8 July · Opening keynote

Together for AI for Good

ITU’s Bogdan-Martin on human agency, why AI answers differently in Kiswahili, and an identity layer for autonomous agents.

Read summary →

More session summaries will appear here as further recordings are published.

Important documents

The summit's flagship reports on AI and the Sustainable Development Goals.

ITU with Deloitte · 2nd ed.

AI for Good Impact Report

The platform's state-of-AI report: the shift from generative to agentic AI, plus sovereign AI and digital public infrastructure. Our brief.

Read the brief → ITU / UNU-CPR · 2025

Unlocking AI's Potential to Serve Humanity

The report behind the summit's theme: robotics, geospatial AI, and AI-native communications as the frontiers for development impact. Our brief.

Read the brief →

Key links