By Marianna Richardson, Director of Communications for the G20 Interfaith Forum and head of its AI working group
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On 23 June 2026, the Open Source × AI day of UN Open Source Week 2026 — at United Nations Headquarters in New York, co-hosted by the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET) and the Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) — closed with the voices most often left out of AI decisions and a set of reflections on where open, sovereign AI goes next. This summary covers the youth meeting; the day’s closing session with Amandeep Singh Gill and representatives of Estonia, Spain, Uruguay, and Paraguay; and the broader conclusions that emerged across the week’s discussions of digital public infrastructure and open-source governance.
The Youth Meeting
The youth meeting gathered young leaders from around the world — many from developing countries — to ask how open-source AI can advance the Sustainable Development Goals and reach communities that are usually left behind. A recurring concern was that closed AI systems are too costly, too error-prone, and too culturally narrow for the NGOs and civil-society organizations that need them; participants argued that open models, support for local languages, and culturally specific datasets are essential if AI is to strengthen equity rather than erode it. Speakers called for investment in digital public infrastructure — the shared digital systems, such as identity, payments, and data exchange, that function as public utilities — along with affordable internet, especially in rural areas, and AI education woven into school and university curricula, so that developing countries can build and govern their own tools rather than import systems that do not fit their needs.
The session was grounded in practical examples. One young innovator presented Skynok, a precision-agriculture project that pairs low-cost drones with autonomous flight, object recognition, and targeted spraying. Where conventional agricultural drones can cost around twenty thousand dollars and are designed for large farms, Skynok’s roughly forty-five-hundred-dollar version is built for smallholders, and its creators reported substantial time savings, higher yields, reduced chemical use, and lower emissions — a direct contribution to the goal of zero hunger. Another speaker warned of a quieter loss: languages such as Portuguese, spoken by hundreds of millions, are nearly invisible in major AI models trained overwhelmingly on English, and when a language is absent from the data, its speakers’ perspectives — and, as one participant put it, part of the record of what is true — begin to disappear. The meeting closed with a call for responsible governance, inclusive design, and open verification so that communities can trust the systems acting on their behalf, and for a deliberate effort to design and test for marginalized users rather than assuming they are included.
The Closing Session
The day’s closing session brought together Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill with ministers and representatives from Estonia, Spain, Uruguay, and Paraguay to reflect on what had been said and where it leads. Openness and transparency, speakers agreed, must remain central; the legitimate economic benefits of AI for business have to be balanced against the rights of people and a meaningful role for civil society. Estonia framed the challenge as one of governance rather than technology, stressing that clear values, open standards, and interoperability are what allow small countries to avoid vendor lock-in. Drawing on its own experience with digital government, Estonia warned that AI without secure, reliable data exchange becomes a bottleneck, and that cyber threats and deliberate misinformation — foreign bots seeding false narratives — can corrode democratic societies. If accurate cultural and historical information is not fed into AI systems, the representative cautioned, nations risk losing their identity and values; open-source tools, shared datasets, and cross-country partnerships can help trustworthy information flow into global models.
Uruguay and Paraguay emphasized both technical and strategic collaboration, particularly to support developing countries and ensure no country is left behind, and argued that open-source AI should be treated as public policy, with governments actively creating and maintaining tools that reflect local languages, cultures, and daily needs. Spain echoed the point, describing a national AI model built to counterbalance the dominance of English-trained systems and to serve small businesses and the many distinct varieties of Spanish spoken across its communities. Across every speaker, a common theme emerged: open standards, open source, and international cooperation are essential to bridging global divides, and countries must become creators of AI — contributing their data, languages, and innovations — rather than remaining consumers. Several noted that open-source collaboration is renewing partnerships between the global north and south, allowing solutions developed in one country to be adapted and scaled in another.
The Road Ahead
Taken together, the day’s sessions pointed to a consistent conclusion: openness, shared governance, and global collaboration have become the defining pillars of responsible AI, because no single nation, company, or institution can or should shape the technology alone. Open source, open standards, and interoperable systems emerged repeatedly as the strongest tools for securing sovereignty, equity, and trust — particularly for smaller nations and developing regions — whether through Germany’s public-code initiatives, Jamaica’s and Sierra Leone’s open-source-first policies, or global efforts like Project Tapestry. The discussions also underscored that AI’s next frontier in robotics and autonomous agents will demand still deeper cooperation, since safety, reliability, and cultural alignment cannot be achieved in isolation.
Underlying it all was trust. Trust, participants agreed, is the central ingredient of a healthy digital future, and it depends on openness, legal certainty, and inclusive participation from every region. Rather than treating regulation and openness as opposites, several speakers argued that well-designed rules and shared agreements — the kind the UN is positioned to broker — can themselves build the trust and legal certainty that innovators need. The day ended, fittingly, with a call to action rather than a conclusion: to promote openness, strengthen collaboration, and build AI systems that uphold dignity, opportunity, and the common good for the largest possible number of people.
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Marianna Richardson is Director of Communications for the G20 Interfaith Forum, where she leads the Forum’s AI working group and its ongoing exploration of how artificial intelligence intersects with faith, ethics, and public policy. She is also an adjunct professor of management communication at the BYU Marriott School of Business, where she serves as editor-in-chief of the Marriott Student Review and faculty advisor for the Measuring Success Right podcast, and she sits on the International Advisory Council for the International Center for Law and Religious Studies. She attended UN Open Source Week 2026 on behalf of the G20 Interfaith Forum to follow developments in open-source and sovereign AI that bear on the Forum’s work at the intersection of faith and policy.