The Alliance for Peacebuilding’s Call to Action: Regulating AI is a Global Effort
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 18, 2026
CONTACT
Nick Zuroski | nick@allianceforpeacebuilding.org
Washington DC, USA — “Human beings built these systems, and human beings can decide to build them in ways that don't ‘kill us all.’ AfP is a part of the effort to design systems that don't divide and polarize us toward conflict.”
-Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of USC Marshall School’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making and the Psychology of Technology Institute
The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) calls for strong, coordinated action across governments, the United Nations, and technology companies in partnership with peacebuilding organizations so AI promotes peace, rather than chaos. Last week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon (also formerly with OpenAI) resigned, claiming “neither company is acting responsibly” and “gambling with our lives.” In the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “The world cannot afford a race to the bottom on AI safety.” But it is not too late to act.
The United Nations must use its convening power to outline principles and best practices, including by building off of the work of its AI Advisory Body. The UN’s AI for Good framework and the recent Pact for the Future and Global Digital Compact are starting points, but must go farther. The UN needs a dedicated, technically capable body with real standing, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for nuclear weapons, as the current advisory bodies have no teeth. This kind of body is critical, given U.S.-China strategic competition that creates powerful incentives for both states to race, rather than regulate, as each state fears falling behind in technological advancement. Member States must agree to something like a Permanent AI Safety Council or, at a minimum, a standing intergovernmental panel (like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that tracks AI risks, including autonomous weapons, disinformation infrastructure, and AI-enabled surveillance of minorities and dissidents. In the short term, the UN can also use existing mechanisms—the Human Rights Council, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, special rapporteurs—to document and name AI-enabled human rights violations, which creates accountability pressure, even without enforcement.
Governments worldwide must step up and use their direct leverage. Domestic regulation is lagging badly. The European Union’s AI Act established risk-tiered regulation, with high-risk applications (biometric surveillance, critical infrastructure, social scoring) facing strict requirements; the US has no equivalent. The U.S. Congress has been slow to respond, and we urgently need oversight hearings and comprehensive legislation. The U.S. Administration could quickly issue an Executive Order that sets safety standards for federal procurement and use, and the U.S. military must establish internal governance guidelines.
Multilateral coordination is desperately needed. The Bletchley Declaration and subsequent AI Safety Summits established a forum, but they are voluntary and industry-heavy. Governments must call for a binding treaty framework among democracies, starting with the G7, that establishes shared standards for high-risk AI, including disinformation, autonomous weapons, and AI-enabled election interference.
Civil Society must use its independent agency to provide more pressure and accountability to call for regulating AI. International norm-building has historically been driven significantly by civil society. The Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the campaign against cluster munitions were all civil society-led. Civil society, especially peacebuilding and prevention organizations, must robustly engage with technology companies and policymakers to embed peacebuilding best practices across the entire AI design cycle. This partnership model ensures the inclusion of communities most impacted by violence, and that technologists can develop frameworks and standards that prevent, reduce, and mitigate AI-enabled conflict.
The peacebuilding field has an opening to engage companies directly on conflict-specific harms by bringing documented evidence of how AI tools have contributed to violence or atrocities, proposing specific design changes, and making the case for conflict-sensitive AI. And civil society brings a wealth of expertise, informed analysis, and recommendations it can draw on for this work, including from the Digital Peacebuilding community, as well as the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion (which AfP leads two hubs of) and its mission to design technology that unites people instead of dividing them. We must not give in to panic—only calling out problems—and instead be part of a whole-of-society effort that minimizes the technology’s harmful impacts and maximizes its contributions to peacebuilding innovation.
We welcome calls from technology companies to pause AI development, as they are the actors with the most capacity to address AI harms, but they also have the strongest financial incentives not to. Beyond pausing development, technology companies must urgently integrate conflict prevention into their development of AI and hire conflict experts that can identify risks and develop responses as the technology grows. Companies will also have to cooperate with each other instead of competing. It is not hyperbole to compare this technology to the arms control race, and similar safeguards must be put in place across governments and companies building AI.
The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP), named the “number one influencer and change agent” among peacebuilding institutions worldwide, is an award-winning nonprofit and nonpartisan network of almost 300 organizations working in 181 countries to prevent and reduce violent conflict and build sustainable peace. AfP cultivates a network to strengthen and advance the peacebuilding field, enabling peacebuilding organizations to achieve greater impact—tackling issues too large for any one organization to address alone.