AI can help usher quantum leap across SDGs
The challenge before us is to ensure that artificial intelligence becomes a force for greater inclusion and shared progress.
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The challenge before us is to ensure that artificial intelligence becomes a force for greater inclusion and shared progress.
Few areas hold greater promise for our common future than the application of AI to sustainable development. AI can accelerate medical breakthroughs. Transform education. Strengthen food systems and agricultural productivity. Spur new industries and create decent jobs.
In short, AI can help usher in a quantum leap across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But it won’t happen if the historical injustices of the past are repeated in the technologies of the future. And yet one-third of humanity is still offline. Many countries continue to face gaps in connectivity, infrastructure and energy access. Computing power, data resources and technical expertise remain concentrated. Hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment flood into artificial intelligence — while many developing countries receive just a trickle.
AI risks pushing the world towards even greater inequalities… greater divides in income, in opportunity, in security… greater gaps between North and South. We cannot let that happen. The challenge before us is to ensure that artificial intelligence becomes a force for greater inclusion and shared progress.
As we look ahead, let me highlight three priorities to help ensure all countries can benefit from the AI revolution.
First — capacity.
Developing countries bring enormous assets to the age of AI. Talent. Ideas. Young, dynamic populations. Every country should be able to shape this technology to its own needs: with its own skills, its own data, in its own languages.
At the United Nations, China helped advance the first General Assembly resolution on AI capacity-building, adopted by consensus. And developing countries deserve support to build that capacity.
The platforms and tools discussed here in Shanghai show what partnership can deliver. Technology built with developing countries, for developing countries. And that means open models countries can adapt.
The open source strategy of China is an enormous global success. Computing power they can afford must be provided. And training for the people who will use them.
Second — safety.
Systems that cross borders need standards that cross borders. We need common approaches to testing, risk assessment and responsibility. We need governance that is inclusive, networked and anchored in international law. Human rights must be protected. Humans must keep control over every life-and-death decision. And no AI system should be put in a child’s hands before it has been proven safe.
And third — sustainability.
AI can help speed the energy transition — managing grids, integrating renewables, cutting waste. But its growing demands for energy, water and land must be brought into the open. I call on every major AI company to disclose the full environmental footprint of their systems — and power them with renewables by 2030.
Several countries — and mainly China — already require data centers to use more renewable power every year. I ask all governments to follow this example — and make clean power for AI part of their national energy plans.
The defining question is not whether artificial intelligence will transform the world. It will. The defining question is whether that transformation will reduce inequalities or reinforce them.
(Excerpts of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks at the opening ceremony of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China on 17 July 2026.)
