The recent years witnessed a global race for the development of emerging technologies commonly referred to as ‘”artificial intelligence” (AI). This race is often said to be led by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States with the European Union (EU) and other countries trying to catch up. At the same time, the rapid progress in the development of AI has also gradually revealed serious risks and dangers, which are becoming exacerbated by the creative combination of AI with other technologies, such as big data, biometrics, synthetic biology, neurotechnologies or the Internet of Things (IoT) to mention but a few. These dangers were widely recognized by the adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI in November 2021. At the same time, several national legislators have proposed or adopted comprehensive or specific laws governing AI, such as the EU AI Act, the US Executive Order on AI, or China’s rules on Generative AI. It is now that the world is witnessing a global race for the regulation of AI, which ought to be one for the global regulation of AI instead.

The reasons for the need of global regulation on AI complementing national legislative acts lies, as the paper argues, primarily in the cross-cutting, cross-border, cross-cultural and all-pervasive nature of AI and related disruptive technologies. These characteristics are also shared by a number of other issues of global concerns as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Therefore, the present paper advocates the alignment of the global regulatory debate about AI with the one of future successor of the SDGs in the context of the Summit of the Future to be held in September 2024. As an additional measure, the paper stresses the urgent need for a drastic reform of the present system of international organizations established within and outside the United Nation Charter System. In this regard, it offers and critically discusses different options for new models of global governance, which include but are not limited to the creation of a new international agency of AI or the establishment of a holarchic framework of global governance. In sum, it seeks to promote a debate seeking to provide a more effective and coherent global mechanism for the monitoring and enforcement of different international treaties and national laws. To this end, the paper will focus on the institutional aspects of the global governance of AI and ponder different scenarios.