Maintaining the ITU “Artificial Intelligence” Resolution

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Maintaining the ITU “Artificial Intelligence” Resolution

On 9 November in Doha, Qatar, the Plenipotentiary Conference of the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will convene all the nations of the world as a treaty-making body. Known as PP-26, it is the continuum of an independent technical-operational organization that has existed in multiple forms since 1850. It was first convened that year at Vienna by the existing national providers of electric telegraph networks to develop the norms, methods, and technical specifications for enabling global intercommunication. It has remained the single global universal treaty organization for this purpose.

Contemporary Plenipotentiary Conferences are typically focused on electing the ITU’s principal officials, setting the agenda and adjusting a set of resolutions that represent globally shared values in a set of Final Acts of Decisions and Resolutions.

Buried among the 287 nation-state Member input document contributions to PP-26 is one entitled simply as Addendum 10 to Document 23-E, United States of America, Proposed Modifications to Resolution 214 (ref. MOD USA/23A10/1). It is one of six proposals addressing Resolution 214, which was adopted at the Bucharest, 2022, Plenipotentiary Conference with the title Artificial intelligence technologies and telecommunications/information and communication technologies. The other PP-26 Res. 214 proposals are modest ones from the African Telecommunication Union (ATU), CEPT, Australia, China-India-Viet Nam, and the Arab States.

Res. 214 was proposed in 2022 in a combination of USA – Canada, and European Administration contributions. The final adopted text is an amalgamation of the contributions and represented a global consensus on the relevant ongoing activities, expectations, and concerns. The global AI community in particular was looking to the Paris-based OECD for collective guidance that was subsequently provided. In 2022, the USA was regarded as a balanced and pragmatic global AI leader—further reflected in many years of “AI for Good” activities undertaken by the ITU itself.

The term “artificial intelligence” seems to generally trace its origins to Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, which was further amplified in the 1950s by a set of leading researchers at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. The term today is universally used and understood worldwide in all manner of technological, scientific, and legal contexts—including notably Resolution 214.

The USA proposal would change “Artificial Intelligence” to “Super Intelligence” and “AI” to “SI” everywhere in the Resolution, as well as eliminate a broad array of global institutional recognitions, references, cautions, and concerns. It would “limit activities to those national, regional and international areas of SI for telecommunications/ICTs” and require that the ITU “shall not engage in activities supporting development of policy or legal frameworks, governance, regulation or ethics.” It would impose on all ITU activity sectors a requirement to “report annually to their respective Sector advisory groups on any ITU activities related to SI taking place in their Sector, to increase transparency and Member State oversight and seek approval for any secretariat-led initiatives outside of the ITU study groups.”

The USA also has an ancillary proposal document attempting to “back door” the term “super intelligence” into the ITU treaty lexiconr the Union for 2024-2027. It inserts the term in an otherwise obscure provision dealing with the operational efficiency of the ITU in the clause “Excellence in human resources and organizational innovation”

It is not apparent, however, that the use of the proposed term reflects anything more than the fringe political expressions of a single person summarily declared on 29 Sept 2026 that affect some USA Federal agencies. Suggesting that they constitute the basis for changes in a global treaty instrument seems highly inappropriate, counterproductive, enormously confusing and also diminishes the respect for international law and global institutional collaboration that has been ongoing for more than 175 years. Furthermore, it masks the widespread collective AI-related concerns and threats of essentially the entire world and expressed by the USA itself four years ago. Whatever views the current USA Administration continues to hold at PP-26 can be expressed in a signing declaration accompanying the Final Acts.

The author has been participating as an engineer-lawyer in diverse ITU activities since 1974 in a wide variety of different capacities, including serving as a senior ITU official, historian, associate professor of law, and writing hundreds of related published materials, including ITU treaty provisions.