The Mathare River is one of the rivers that flows into Nairobi River. Photo by Queen Asali/Wiki For Sustainable Futures 2026/CC by 4.0

The Mathare River is one of the rivers that flows into Nairobi River. Photo by 

Taxing Tech in Age of AI Could Fund Human Rights

Composite. Left, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito attends a meeting in Rome, Sept. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini) Right, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is seen in the US Capitol on Thursday, March 26, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

How the Supreme Court and Big Tech Both Weaponize 'Race-Neutrality'

Children’s Digital Rights Need More Than a False Promise of Safety

In an aerial view, the Meta El Paso Data Center is seen on August 13, 2026 in El Paso, Texas. Meta continues construction on its more than $10 billion data center, occupying approximately 1,000 acres, and has expanded the project to 1 gigawatt of computing capacity, allowing the facility to support a growing range of AI workloads and the training and deployment of AI models and technologies. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto Lost it at Compute

Flock Safety camera on Haverhill Drive near Phillips Avenue in Toledo, Ohio. (Photo by Stephen Zenner / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Unless Flock is Reined In, Mass Video Surveillance Will Grow Even More Pervasive

Protesters rally against data centers in Hillsboro, Ore., on May 16, 2026.  (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa via AP Images)

How to Use Your Community’s Data Center Moratorium

Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, waves as he arrives at the opening ceremony for the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Friday, July 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool)

Will China Crack Down on Open-Weight Models?

Brazilian presidential candidate Ronaldo Caiado, former governor of Goias state, presents his public security policy in Sao Paulo, Brazil August 10, 2026. REUTERS/Jean Carniel

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CEO of Meta Platforms Mark Zuckerberg attends the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference at the Sun Valley Lodge on July 9, 2026 in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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Cemetery for people on the move in Soufli, Evros, Greece. Photo by Petra Molnar.

The Racial Necrotechnics That Lead to Death By Design at Automated Borders

AI Meets the US Midterm Elections

Michigan residents turn out to vote in the midterm elections at Brookside Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026. (Isaac Ritchey/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

How AI Is Reshaping Election Information Ahead of the 2026 US Midterms

A brightly coloured illustration which can be viewed in any direction. It has several scenes within it: people in front of computers seeming stressed, a number of faces overlaid over each other, squashed emojis and other motifs.

Here Come the Synthetic Voters

A person passes next to an Aadhaar Seva Kendra in Kolkata, India on August 15, 2023. (Photo by Sudipta Das/NurPhoto via AP)

Aadhaar's Success Story Deserves a Closer Look

The Discord logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on February 28, 2026. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via AP)

Brazil Suspends Discord's Livestreams in First Enforcement Test of Child Protection Law

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is seen in the US Capitol after a meeting in the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., on Thursday, March 26, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

When an AI Manifesto Runs Into Reality

Richmond County Courthouse sign in Augusta, Georgia. Shutterstock

Richmond County Courthouse sign in Augusta, Georgia. 

Why Public Defense Should Incorporate AI Carefully

A school bus in in Marilia, São Paulo, Brazil, April 12, 2025. Shutterstock

A school bus in in Marilia, São Paulo, Brazil, April 12, 2025. 

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People visit the booth of Kimi, an LLM developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China, Monday, July 20, 2026. (FeatureChina via AP Images)

US Government’s AI Risk Review Should Apply to Open Weight Models

In an aerial view, the 1,000 acre Meta El Paso Data Center as of August 13, 2026 in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

 is this: “superintelligence-for-all” empowerment will never happen if Meta and other hyperscalers monopolize compute. Control over compute is a tool of domination as powerful as any of the frontier model secret weights that Zuckerberg slags.

 observes wryly that in the manifesto, “a man who single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant comes out as a critic of corporate power.” Platformer’s 

 notes that while Zuckerberg “celebrates individual voices and democracy,” his company “is working to warp the democratic process through secretive data center deals.” Through those deals, Meta is trying to catch up with the other four hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle), who together 

 of the world’s AI compute. Zuckerberg doesn’t talk about 

 source of power. Instead, he focuses further up the stack on models and applications. Here, he says, “[r]ather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it.”

 the physical infrastructure needed to produce that superintelligence? Infrastructure power 

, in its 2024 report on open weight models (p.30) noted that access to compute is a significant chokepoint for innovating with such models. As 

, “the computational resources needed to build new AI models and use existing ones at scale… are scarce, extremely expensive, and concentrated [and] this significant resource asymmetry undermines any claims to democratization that the availability of ‘open’ AI models might be used to support.” (p.8)

In other words, frothing about AI democracy and liberty is useless without addressing compute. Zuckerberg knows this. That’s why he acknowledges compute as a pinch point in the flow of freedoms he champions. “No matter how intelligent AI becomes, there will always be a finite amount of compute and therefore an opportunity cost for how we use it,” he writes. His response to this scarcity is for the tech giants to build ever more compute so that there’s enough for training “recursive self-improvement” while also “committing the significant majority towards people's individual goals.” Here, as elsewhere in the manifesto, governance choices are the tech companies’ to make. 

 will own the means through which people self-actualize. Every “exceptionally capable personal agent” and every “powerful tool to build businesses” and all the other compute-driven wonders the manifesto teases will depend on the few companies controlling compute.

For the conveniently libertarian political theory of Zuckerberg’s manifesto, this concentrated private power is unimportant. The only real threat to AI-enabled individual liberty is government tyranny. “There is a risk that an imbalance of power between individuals and government leads to a loss of freedom or totalitarian state,” Zuckerberg writes. “This is a constant tension in democracy.” What’s also a constant tension in democracy is how to constrain overweening private power. Technology policy in the American democracy has never been libertarian. Zuckerberg’s only recognition of private compute power is his assurance that Meta (and other benign titans) will distribute compute widely and focus heavily on alignment. In other words, “trust us.” Given Meta’s history on the trust front, as it appeals a pathbreaking New Mexico court judgment that it is a public nuisance, this tack is laughable. And it has been loudly laughed at 

. Obviously, binding and transparent regulation is a more effective check. The manifesto will have none of it ,and Meta has been instrumental in making sure the federal government enacts none.

What might a compute policy look like that took self-empowerment and democracy seriously? A person writing a version of Zuckerberg’s screed with an eye to network studies might have cited Ithiel de Sola Pool’s classic 1984 work, 

. Pool wrote about how new technologies (like “electronic publishing”) might usher in new freedoms through “distributed intelligence” (p. 251) if only government could abstain from centralizing control. This fits well with Zuckerberg’s paean to decentralized open weight models and preference for policy that amounts to little more than facilitating Meta’s business model. But here’s the thing. Pool understood that freedom at the application layer might require regulation at the infrastructure layer in the form of common carriage and access requirements.

For compute, and more generally for cloud services that mediate access to compute, we can look to the same family of tools long used in US regulation of concentrated networks, platforms, and utilities.

Remove chokeholds on access to compute where necessary through some combination of nondiscrimination, interconnection, and common carrier obligations. Jai Vipra and Sarah Myers West of the 

 have a nice report on this from 2023 when the FTC and the Department of Treasury were beginning to sound the alarm on undue concentration and points of failure in the compute and cloud services markets. Last year, 

 of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator published a blueprint for federal legislation for the AI stack, including compute, that he described as pro-competition and pro-national security, and which might actually create the balance of power Zuckerberg’s manifesto praises.

Ensure that there is some meaningful supply of “public compute” that is not controlled by any company. The scarcity of compute for scientific research has led to nascent federal efforts to amalgamate commercial and government compute for research in the 

 with new compute resources, again mostly for research. One might imagine a federated network of state compute forming a sovereign compute infrastructure of the kind 

 is trying to build. A new idea would be to regularize public compute set-asides as part of data center builds. What if hyperscalers had to set aside a certain amount of  “

”, like a public park, for the autonomous use of nonprofits, local governments, and educational institutions? Cable companies had to set aside PEG channels when building out their networks and the FCC reserved noncommercial broadcast channels for public service.

Require transparency. One could talk about transparency at each of the layers in the stack, but let’s limit it here to compute. Here too, the libertarian Pool acknowledged that to have freedom at the top layers – the only ones Zuckerberg really addresses – we need to know how companies are managing the infrastructure choke points. In the case of compute, this might include the amount of compute capacity a firm actually controls, to whom that capacity is allocated (including to the owner itself), and pricing terms.

For ten years at least, Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised connection and democracy on his platforms. Instead, we’ve gotten slop and oligarchic control. The AI manifesto promising superintelligence-for-all is cut from the same cloth. But still, it’s worth taking the aspiration at face value and asking what it would take to actually democratize AI at each layer of the stack, starting with compute. It would require that people who want to run models and applications can do so freely without control or interference from infrastructure providers.

Lisa Dittmer is Amnesty International’s Children’s Digital Rights Researcher, and Paloma Candia and Ahmed Dhman are two of Amnesty International’s 

, a global network of child and youth human rights defenders.

Children’s online safety has become a leading political issue as concerns about Big Tech harms have moved from academic debates to bestseller lists and mainstream news. French President Emmanuel Macron hailed France’s teen social media ban as “

leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers

, citing privacy and freedom of expression concerns. United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Guterres has called for an 

artificial intelligence (AI) Child Safety Pledge

. Yet amid the flurry of high-level pledges and the rush to protect “our children,” the voices of one demographic are noticeably absent: children themselves.

A brief prerecorded video aside, not a single child got to speak when a 

new state coalition for the protection of children

 launched its work at the UN AI Dialogue in July. Kenya, one of the state parties to the coalition, is currently debating a new AI bill that 

lacks any child-specific protections or consultation mechanism

. The absence of children and young people in policymaking spaces and the failure to recognize their demands and needs are clearly linked.

Globally, a mixture of Big Tech state capture, political shortsightedness and a rise in digital authoritarian practices is hollowing out children’s rights just as the world proclaims to finally making children safe online.

Mitigating harm rather than fulfilling rights

Children and young people are frequently treated as passive subjects who need to be saved through regulation rather than as participants in shaping the rules that affect them. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children’s right to be heard, but their participation all too often remains tokenistic at best. Inviting comments from a select number of children within predefined confines and without means to materially shape processes and outcomes isn’t meaningful participation.

It is this paternalistic attitude that increasingly reduces children’s digital rights issues to a question of mitigating harm, rather than the fulfillment of their rights and the creation of a positive digital future. While social media harms need urgent addressing, teen social media bans exemplify the resulting performative politics, which seek to appease an adult voter base rather than address the root causes of tech harms.

Child and youth campaigners have long called for solutions that address the manipulative design choices and the privacy violations common to children’s experiences across social media, games and AI chatbots. Youth-led organizations such as 

 have been vocal advocates for more nuanced solutions that reflect children’s and young people’s lived experiences.

And still, these calls for systemic change all too often go unheard as political leaders embrace supposed quick wins for “our protection.” Risks such as cyberbullying, grooming, online violence, and problematic social media use need to be tackled, but attempting to lock children out who also rely on these platforms for community, information and activism dismisses a whole set of rights for a false promise of safety. E

 shows clear flaws in this thinking: children continue to access the harmful platforms they were meant to be locked out of while those who evade the ban or are never excluded remain exposed to the very harms the policy seeks to tackle.

Meanwhile, core challenges to children and young people’s digital rights remain unaddressed.

The normalization of online surveillance in children’s lives

Children and young people are growing up in a world where their personal data is constantly collected, tracked and shared, from the moment 

online platforms and advertisers pick up on a pregnancy

 to their first exploration of the digital world through videos and games, and on to schools and universities, which increasingly monitor learners through safeguarding tools, biometric attendance registration and AI-enabled performance analysis and behavior management. In this way, children are trained to grow accustomed to surveillance by a largely invisible network of government and private actors, in most cases without free and informed consent.

Many of the same governments currently debating teenage restrictions on social media enthusiastically embrace the AI hype in education, inviting collaborations with major AI firms to bring chatbots into schools despite serious concerns about the lack of child rights safeguards related to online privacy, manipulative design, discriminatory and otherwise harmful outputs, as well as a lack of research evidence of educational benefits and risks.

Children’s data remains poorly protected and is now at risk of being eroded further by the age assurance tools necessary to enforce teen bans. The global drive is one towards stricter age checks, presenting new risks of additional data trails, cybersecurity incidents and online surveillance by both corporate and state actors. 

France just sidestepped the question of enforcement of its new teen ban law

 to avoid a clash with European regulation, but so-called Digital Identity Wallets will soon pervade online experiences across the EU, 

are seizing the child online safety moment to propose measures that will further add to existing privacy and free expression concerns affecting child and adult internet users alike.

Casting governments as a force for good amidst increasing digital repression

The current debate also ignores the many ways in which governments actively abuse technology to monitor and silence children and young people. The recent wave of influential Gen Z protests across diverse contexts, including, among others, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Kenya, Madagascar and Peru, has highlighted the power of digitally connected and social media-savvy youths.

On the flip side, governments are increasingly turning young activists’ social media footprints and data trails into tools of censorship and repression. When students took to the streets of Delhi to demand the resignation of the education minister, the Indian government responded by 

first shutting down mobile data service in central parts of the city

Bluetooth-based app that young people had turned to amidst the shutdown

. In Kenya, Amnesty International documented 

how authorities weaponized online harassment and surveillance to quell nationwide youth-led protests

 are already taking state surveillance capacities to new levels, facilitating crackdowns on migrants and protesters alike.

All of these are critical challenges to the digital rights of children and young people, which the current narrow fixation on social media bans overlooks. Politics that attempt to shut out the youth instead of working with them will fail, as Australian teens and Indian students are powerfully proving.

Children and young people finally need to be meaningfully included in all their diversity as critical experts of their own experiences if their rights and safety are to be more than a step toward increased internet control and willful disenfranchisement.

Instead of tokenistic one-off engagements, governments need to create opportunities for children to feed into digital policy processes in safe and meaningful ways, showing accountability for how their input is reflected in policy, just as tech companies need to co-design products with children if they are to be used by children.

Regulators should look to build towards a positive digital future, investing in digital literacy and creating policies that preserve and reward the benefits of the digital world, rather than simply mitigating harms. That means effectively safeguarding children’s and adults’ privacy, regulating online services by mandating meaningful user choice and agency and banning manipulative design, reigning in Big Tech power and setting effective limits on state surveillance powers.

“Nobody should have to choose between their safety and their voice,” Kenyan high school student Mark Igathe recently wrote in his winning entry to Amnesty Kenya’s annual digital rights essay competition. Policymakers would do well to make more space for those voices and to listen.

A dangerous idea is reshaping American democracy. Both online and offline, we are seeing the adoption of a “race-neutral” approach to consequential decisions, even though race plays a defining role in how we relate to one another. This shift harms communities of color and ultimately undermines our multiracial democracy.

In April, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the nation's most important law protecting voters of color from discriminatory voting maps. Justice Samuel Alito’s 

 for the conservative majority makes it nearly impossible to challenge district lines that reduce the political influence of voters of color. Rather than looking at whether a map unfairly divides communities of color to prevent them from electing their preferred representatives, the majority embraced a race-neutral approach that treats racial inequality as a problem of the past. The practical impact of this decision is that Black representation in Congress 

 to create new voting maps following the ruling in 

 does not stop at district boundaries. The idea that racial fairness comes from ignoring race is a fallacy that undergirds a wide range of structures in American society that reify and perpetuate racial inequality — including online.

Many social media platforms employ some combination of AI and human review in their trust and safety systems to protect users and moderate content. This includes identifying and acting on hate speech, harassment, and illegal material. However, because these systems are 

 that mirrors Alito’s reasoning, they result in the same disproportionate harm for communities of color.

 about Facebook’s internal processes noted that its AI tools treated hate speech the same regardless of whether the target was white or Black, even though the abuse aimed at people of color was 

. In other words, the platforms treat all users identically regardless of race (and gender, age, etc.), even though society does not. Across social media, trust and safety systems may also 

 posts about racism by people of color because the systems conflate discussion about hate speech with actual hate speech.

A related problem is the suggestion that if there is no 

racism, then there is no racism. However, attempting to demonstrate intent is virtually impossible in these scenarios. As Justice Elena Kagan observed in her 

Now, as then, vote-dilution plaintiffs will have to show more than vote dilution: They will have to show, as well, race-based motive. Now, as then, that requirement will make success in their suits nearly impossible, even if an electoral practice has in fact ‘minimize[d] or cancel[ed] out’ minority citizens’ ‘voting strength.’

Similarly, social media platforms make intent a core element of their content moderation policies around hate speech and other harmful content, yet intent is very 

 for humans — and even more so for machines — to discern in practice. As social media companies increasingly rely on AI-based technologies to analyze content, these models will almost certainly struggle to accurately assess context and intention, potentially leaving race-based hate speech online.

Historically, legal doctrine has therefore looked to outcomes or impact, and not just intent, when evaluating racial discrimination. Alito and the conservative majority have not only undermined this legal precedent with regard to voting rights but have also moved the Supreme Court to be more in line with how AI-led trust and safety systems operate: prioritizing race-neutrality. We are left with an increasingly pervasive ideology that promotes race-neutrality dressed up as law or algorithm, which has and will continue to lead to disproportionately negative outcomes for people of color.

How can we move toward greater racial equity when those who make consequential decisions for hundreds of millions of Americans subscribe to an illusory, race-neutral version of reality that harms people of color — and indeed, all of us? Or when companies like Meta choose race-neutral trust and safety systems to 

One path forward is to adopt alternative structures that rely less on these decision-makers. Voting rights experts, for example, have called for 

, which could help overcome the challenges to equitable representation in voting post-

. In the private, corporatized world of social media, alternatives may be less clear. Suggestions include different structures, such as 

 — an interconnected set of social media networks, where each community sets its own moderation policies — including platforms centered around 

. We can also demand that companies give users greater control over the 

recommender systems that shape their feeds

. These could reduce systemic harm for communities of color. However, there remains an immense opportunity for trust and safety experts to develop more contextually aware and 

 that people of color experience a lot or at least some discrimination across various aspects of their lives. We need laws and algorithms to prevent this racial discrimination. But when those deciding on such rules — whether on the Supreme Court or in large social media companies like Meta — refuse to see the problem in the first place, we must advance alternatives. The viability of our multiracial democracy depends on it.

The author wishes to thank Spencer Overton, G. Michael Parsons, and Lisa Bornstein for their helpful comments.

Sarah Saadoun is a senior economic inequality adviser at Human Rights Watch.

 about the economic fallout of artificial intelligence have brought tax policy into the spotlight. Governments could 

find themselves desperate for more revenue

 at exactly the same time that they are losing the taxes those vanished jobs would have generated.

There is no magic bullet governments can use to resolve this problem. One approach with 

 AI profits. The idea is that governments could use that revenue to help manage the human rights impacts of rapid, AI-driven change. This approach has support in some surprising quarters. 

 have both floated proposals that would increase taxes on companies benefiting from AI as part of their case for widespread adoption of AI.

The current international tax system doesn’t allow states much room to do this effectively, however. A century-old rule common in bilateral tax treaties requiring physical presence 

 of the world’s governments, which was a growing problem even before the advent of AI. A change requires a much larger, collective solution to the larger failings of our global tax system. Luckily, it is already taking shape.

 that could finally make it easier to tax tech companies, among other badly needed global tax reforms. Not only could this treaty better equip governments to weather AI-driven uncertainty, but it could give them essential tools to better protect and realize human rights across the board.

Rules for cross-border taxation set out in the 1920s and fine-tuned by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) form the basis of thousands of bilateral tax agreements between countries. These treaties generally let governments tax a foreign company’s profits only if it has a “permanent establishment”—a physical presence—in the country.

This means tech giants like Meta or Uber, which often operate entirely remotely, can earn fortunes in a country while paying tax on profits somewhere else entirely. For instance, Facebook has some 

 in Bangladesh, more than one-third of the population, yet has 

 of the “Silicon Six” found that these tech giants earned nearly half their $11 trillion revenues overseas between 2015 and 2024, yet only 30 percent of what they reported in estimated taxes was booked to foreign governments—disproportionately tax havens. For Global South governments especially, this increasingly adds to larger problems with an international tax system that hampers their ability to adequately fund human rights imperatives, such as education, health, and an effective justice system.

 of the global GDP and is growing fast. If even modest 

 of AI’s transformative impact pan out, the cost of the old tax rules to government revenues—and to rights—will significantly grow.

Attempts to get around these rules, including by opting out of bilateral tax treaties that impose the constraints, typically yield relatively 

 because, on their own, governments struggle with 

. Unilateral measures also make governments vulnerable to 

 by other governments, particularly from the 

This is one reason why many governments have banded together to push for a first-ever UN tax treaty. The US has walked out of negotiations, but dozens of other governments are hammering out an agreement that could be adopted in 2027. One of its key issues is how digital services are taxed. African countries, for example, have 

 allowing governments to also tax companies where payments and market engagement take place. This could include, for instance, social media advertisements, digital subscriptions, and digital labor platforms.

The treaty also aims to tackle other obstacles to fairly taxing companies, like profit-shifting to tax havens and tax systems that struggle to cooperate across borders.

Kenya’s uphill battle to tax tech illustrates why this matters. Although the country’s economy has

 over the past decade, between 2019 and 2022 the number of Kenyans living below the national poverty line increased by approximately 4 million. At the same time, government spending on public 

 fell well below best-practice global benchmarks. In fact, education spending as a share of GDP 

In Mathare, one of the largest informal housing settlements in Nairobi, residents have fought for years to get even a single public elementary school built in an area with 100,000 people. Jack Owuor, one of these residents, explained to me that he had no choice but to pay for private schools for his children, like a 

. Another resident said she has been denied medicine for her asthma because she couldn’t pay.

 raising revenues, although other issues are also to blame. One way Kenya has tried to increase its revenues is by taxing its digital economy, a fast-growing sector that is 

 to contribute $5 billion to GDP by 2028. This doesn’t distinguish between national and foreign firms, but Kenya struggles to effectively tax those based overseas.

Kenya does not have a tax treaty with the US, where most tech giants are headquartered. In 2021, the government put in place a 1.5 percent 

 on non-resident providers like streaming platforms, ride-hailing apps, and online marketplaces. Annual revenues from the tax have gradually increased, but in 2024 it still only brought in

. In December 2024, it replaced this tax with an effective 3 percent levy on the gross digital revenues of foreign providers. Figures from Kenya’s revenue authority indicated that these taxes generated a combined $12 million in the fiscal year that ended in June.

These are positive steps given the limitations, but a drop in the bucket relative to the scale of the need—or the sector’s size. Kenya also faces 

 similar taxes. A country acting alone can only do so much. It would take a global fix to enable governments to tax global tech firms in a way that reflects the scale of their domestic economic activity and profits.

The difficulty of taxing tech and other company profits means higher taxes on regular people, especially since an IMF program that ran between 2021 and 2025 required the government to hit revenue targets. In 2023, Alfredo Akeyo, who also lives in Mathare, 

 that price increases for public transportation following a new fuel tax meant that he was sometimes unable to send his children to school. The following year, a 

 that would have raised taxes on things like cooking oil and sanitary pads sparked nationwide protests.

Kenya’s situation is not unique. Even in a decade marred by a pandemic, wars, and inflation, nearly all governments saw their 

, many significantly. But these gains often have not translated into better fulfilment of people’s rights in part because an outdated 

 makes it difficult for governments, particularly in the Global South, to raise enough revenue. According to the International Monetary Fund, 71 governments have tax-to-GDP ratios 

, which it considers the “tipping point” for funding essential services.

People have paid the price through their governments’ inability to fund key services their human rights depend on. Between 2019 and 2022, 37 governments 

 their spending on health care per capita in real terms; four of five people worldwide now live in countries where public health spending is below the widely accepted benchmark of 5 percent of GDP. According to the 

, education spending per child has either decreased or stagnated globally. And about 

 the world’s population lacks any form of social security benefit, contributing to an estimated 

—equivalent to the population of the US—experiencing food insecurity than before the pandemic.

The UN treaty could help turn the tide. It is a landmark opportunity for governments to come together to decide on a better global tax system, one that also adequately deals with multinational tech companies.

But if policy debates about taxing AI continue to narrowly focus on the US and other rich countries, they will leave out governments already struggling with tax rules that will leave them at a profound disadvantage in this new policy arena. It is worth heeding their hard-learned lessons, and these states deserve a solution that includes them.

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