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During the sixth ministerial council meeting of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), representatives of the grouping announced an “integrated partnership” with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to bring “OECD members and GPAI countries on equal footing, under the GPAI brand” – but to arrive at this consensus, some trade-offs had to be made behind the scenes, The Indian Express has learnt.
The GPAI, since its inception in 2020, was supported by a secretariat hosted by the OECD. This paper has learnt that the initial conversation was that the GPAI would work under the OECD’s Working Party on Artificial Intelligence Governance (AIGO). However, countries like India and Japan are understood to have pushed back on it, with concerns that the efforts they have made at making GPAI a relevant multi stakeholder organisation might get diluted if it were to work under the OECD.
As such, the announcement that the GPAI will have an “integrated partnership” with the OECD, bringing OECD members and GPAI countries together under the former’s brand is a strategic win for India and like-minded countries. Effectively, India managed to negotiate that the GPAI banner be kept alive, and function alongside OECD members, rather than working under them.
There were also concerns that because India, and a large part of the developing world, is not a member of the OECD, if the GPAI was to go under the AIGO, it would reduce the space for them to raise issues relevant to the AI-related discourse in their respective nations. The joint announcement made Wednesday says that it “underscores that all members of the integrated partnership will participate equally, without distinction or disparities, in the partnership’s activities and its decision-making”. It also added that the integrated partnership may consider the development of its specific working methods, through consensus, based on the equal footing of all members irrespective of their OECD membership status.
But, there have been trade-offs, especially on where the secretariat of the GPAI would be hosted. It is understood that since India took over the presidency of the GPAI, it had been pushing for an independent secretariat, to essentially take the grouping outside of the OECD’s purview. This has not come to fruition, as the GPAI’s secretariat is expected to continue with the OECD.
“The secretariat at the OECD was coming to an end around May, but the whole thing was in a limbo on where the secretariat would be after that. India wanted either an independent or a rotation secretariat, but OECD seems to have put its foot down in keeping the secretariat with itself,” a senior government official said. “The idea is that GPAI will remain associated with OECD. Non-OECD GPAI members will be treated on par with OECD members,” a second senior government official said on condition of anonymity.
Launched in June 2020 with 15 members, GPAI is the fruition of an idea developed within the G7. Today, GPAI’s 29 members are Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.
