By January 2027 – when the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies hopes to maybe start taking public comment on a national AI policy – a United Nations approach to AI will already be the subject of lobbying.
At the beginning of last week, we got a solid indicator that the United Nations gets it: if you are dealing with AI, you can't move at pre-AI speed.
Enterprises – heck, even small businesses – got it in 2025, and started to measure AI projects in weekly rather than quarterly increments. This year, academia is starting to realise that publishing a paper on the cutting edge of AI eight months after your research means you are two, maybe three flagship models behind.
Now global diplomacy is getting it too. And that is terrible news for South Africa.
The Global Dialogue on AI Governance opened in Geneva last Monday. It was a talk shop, as you would expect of what amounts to the first proper, global meeting about taming AI. But it was a talk shop dominated by people freaked out about what they are seeing happening in real-time, and who want to do something about it, fast.
UN secretary-general António Guterres pointed out that autonomous killer robots are not ideal, and an expert panel effectively told governments that they are on the cusp of ceding much of their power to AI vendors.
Somebody, as the saying goes, should do something.
None of this is news to anyone, but you have to appreciate the herd mentality in global diplomacy. Many countries know they lack the power to set the agenda, and carefully husband their credibility. They don't want to seem alarmist on AI, not least of all because they need to use what political capital they have on issues that affect them more directly, today.
But once there is a convergence towards consensus – in this case that tough, global AI regulation is needed, yesterday – the momentum builds fast because the risk to individual players dwindles.
Based on the rumours and anecdotes coming out of Geneva, things moved with unprecedented speed once it was clear that most of the world is of a like mind. There is a push to talk about actual principles, maybe even language, at a follow-up meeting in New York in May 2027. And, though that kind of speed would have seemed inconceivable pre-AI, there could even be a draft treaty under discussion before 2028.
If enough countries believe that is possible, then we will have serious backroom wrangling by early 2027.
In other words, if you want to help steer global policy on the most consequential technology ever, you have less than six months to gear up for it. Or roughly the same amount of time South Africa intends to take to redraft its AI policy and put it in front of the public, in a process that is supposed to give lots of time for comments that can fundamentally change the nature of that policy.
You kind of need your own policy first if you want to have policy credibility in a policy debate.
By rights, South Africa should have a huge influence on the UN's future AI rules. SA has Global South credibility in a context where everyone sees the USA as the enemy, and where there is a fair amount of suspicion of China and Europe too. SA has the philosophical toolkit; Ubuntu is exactly what AI regulation calls for. It has the technical credibility; SA can field top-class experts in everything from law to mathematics.
But you kind of need your own policy first if you want to have policy credibility in a policy debate. While SA is still officially trying to figure out what the hell it is going to do about AI domestically, it has no credible voice globally.
The good news is that it may not matter. If you listen to the industry, both AI vendors and ICT more broadly, nobody is taking the UN seriously. It was a forum with little practical power even before the current American administration dismantled multilateralism. And, fair enough, it doesn't have a great track record of being effective at pretty much anything.
If you listen to the diplomats, though, this is not business as usual. In the face of being caught between warring AI superpowers, rest-of-world countries are pulling together in ways that could define markets and draw battle lines and change the world.
It would be great if South Africa could deign to move fast enough to participate.
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