The world’s governments, technology companies and civil society groups converged on Geneva this month for what organizers called the largest gathering of artificial-intelligence governance activity ever assembled in one place.

The first session of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance opened on July 6 and 7 under United Nations auspices, running alongside the World Summit on the Information Society Forum and the International Telecommunication Union’s AI for Good summit. A second session is expected to follow in New York, extending a process that diplomats hope will outlast any single administration.

The meetings reflect a widening push to set shared rules for frontier AI as capabilities outpace regulation. Discussions spanned security, ethics, technical standards and the military use of artificial intelligence, with a separate conference convened by the UN Institute for Disarmament Research examining risks in the military domain under a General Assembly resolution adopted last year.

With competing national frameworks emerging from the United States, the European Union, China and others, negotiators are wrestling with a core question: who controls access to the most powerful models? Geneva’s week of talks is less about final treaties than about building the habits of coordination before harm occurs, participants said.

No binding accord is expected this year. But organizers pointed to a growing consensus on transparency, incident reporting and safety standards for advanced systems. Whether that soft agreement translates into enforceable rules remains the open question as the technology continues to advance faster than the institutions chartered to govern it.

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