AI safety is designed in the West, and failing users ...

Ah, marvellous. The global majority has finally been granted a seat at the AI safety table, only to discover the table is a small, high-income one and the seats are all facing a PowerPoint about someone else's values. Researchers and analysts, as Rest of World reports, have noticed that safety frameworks, standards and institutions have been designed in and for a handful of wealthy countries, leaving most of the planet as test subjects rather than co-authors. One does not need to squint to see the pattern: Silicon Valley builds, Brussels regulates, and Lagos or Jakarta absorbs the crashes. And when the systems fail — as they will, majestically — the people most likely to get the sharp end are precisely those who had no hand in writing the manual.

Then comes the Future of Life Institute's contribution, for which one should perhaps pour a large one. The institute says even industry leaders are retreating from their prior commitments while publicly calling for a pause. So the labs manage the impressive feat of simultaneously demanding a moratorium — a thoroughly sensible-sounding thing, for the cameras — and quietly walking back the promises they made when the cameras were pointing elsewhere. FLI's historical experience with pause requests suggests this is how the industry plans to look thoughtful without actually pausing anything.

The tragedy isn't that safety is failing; it's that 'safety' was always a Western product, shipped to the global majority with no instructions and a foreign plug. If the people designing the guardrails can't even agree with themselves — if the loudest voices for a pause are simultaneously the ones quietly unpausing their own commitments — then the only thing being globalised is risk. But by all means, let's hold another high-level workshop in a Geneva hotel to workshop the problem. I'm sure the global majority will be represented by one apologetic panel slot and a free tote bag.