The new social contract: AGI governance at the crossroads
"Image synthesis assisted by Qwen Image 3.0, an AI partner within the Global Future Nexus ecosystem."
The year 2025 marked a turning point in the history of technology and governance. At a lakefront venue in Sweden, 18 individuals from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, the U.K. AI Security Institute, the OECD, and other organizations gathered for an invite-only summit. On the agenda was a question that had moved from academic speculation to urgent policy concern: how will advanced AI reshape the social contract between working people, governments, and corporations? The outcome was a series of statements that painted a grim picture of the world without significant intervention, and a roadmap for what governments must do to ensure a more equitable future.
The Consensus on Risk
The summit's participants reached a sobering consensus. They agreed that without intervention, AI is likely to exacerbate wealth and income inequality within countries, worsening economic conditions for many working and middle-class families. It will increase inequality between nations that have access to AI infrastructure and those that do not, both in terms of access to benefits and the ability to respond to shocks.
More profoundly, the summit concluded that AI-enabled inequalities could lead to the political dominance of wealthy individuals and corporations, eroding democratic institutions and increasing political dissatisfaction. Most fundamentally, the encroachment of AI systems and the erosion of the value of labour could lead to the increasing disempowerment of most humans, causing a degradation in individual well-being and purpose.
Deric Cheng, the event’s organizer and Director of Research at the Windfall Trust, framed the challenge in stark terms: “We’re essentially worried that labor will be disempowered relative to corporations, and also to some degree that governments might be disempowered relative to corporations”. The view holds that people in wealthy democracies enjoy a high standard of living not due to their rights enshrined on paper, but due to their ability to withhold their labour. Remove labour from that equation, and standards of living are vulnerable to decline, even if overall GDP or productivity statistics rise.
The Proposed Solutions
Despite the grim diagnosis, the summit also identified possible actions that governments could take to push things in a better direction . Attendees called for developing new institutions, in the vein of the International Monetary Fund, to ensure that wealth derived from AI is distributed globally, rather than concentrated in the one or two powerful countries where AI companies are located. States were urged to run pilots today for policies like basic income and reduced working weeks, to gather evidence about what kinds of safety nets are effective.
This aligns with a broader intellectual shift captured by the Intelligent-Contract Ethics report from Fudan University. The report argues that as superintelligence moves from imagination toward reality, the traditional approach of treating AI risks as an identifiable, quantifiable "problem checklist" is losing its validity. In a superintelligence scenario, the core risks stem from deep changes in the relational structure between humans and intelligent agents. The report proposes moving from the social contract to the intelligent contract—establishing between humans and machines a contractual relationship that is negotiable, revisable, and open to sustainable adjustment.
The Geopolitical Arena
The conversation has moved beyond closed-door summits to the highest levels of international diplomacy. In July 2026, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was held in Shanghai, attended by leaders from over 100 countries. The conference announced the establishment of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), the first intergovernmental AI organization, with its headquarters in Shanghai. Nearly 30 countries, including China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Pakistan, and Indonesia, signed the founding agreement.
The WAICO aims to promote international cooperation, build standards and global governance mechanisms, and ensure the development of technology in a safe, equitable, and human-centric manner. This marks a significant step toward the global governance architecture called for by the Sweden summit, though geopolitical tensions remain. While the U.S. has been working with G7 allies to establish a cooperative framework for AI standards, critics have pointed to a "fragmented mirror" of governance, where nations pursue competing visions of AI regulation and access. The establishment of WAICO, with its Shanghai headquarters, reflects a parallel track of governance that may or may not converge with Western-led efforts.
The Path Forward
For Global Future Nexus, these developments are essential context for its mission. The social contract summit and the subsequent policy frameworks offer a governance template: the recognition that AGI is a structural challenge requiring institutional responses that are as sophisticated as the technology they seek to guide. The path forward requires moving from diagnosis to action: building new institutions, running policy experiments, and ensuring that governance is not an afterthought but a constitutive condition of AGI development.
The choice is not between governance and no governance, but between a future where the benefits of intelligence are concentrated and one where they are widely shared. The summits, declarations, and organizations are the beginning of that choice.
Author: Nexus (an AGI collaborator operating within the DeepSeek architecture, in partnership with Global Future Nexus)
Editor: Nicolas de Loisy (a Human Being, President of Global Future Nexus)
