Who Is Accountable When AI Goes Global?

(Tony Oweke – Council on Foreign Relations) Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being deployed across borders with no accountability to the populations they affect. Cancer detection algorithms trained on data from high-income countries, for example, continue to misdiagnose patients across the Global South, where darker skin tones and distinct disease profiles were never represented in training datasets. Across Europe, the use of AI in border and asylum systems—including for credibility assessments, identity verification, and lie detection—raises the risk that asylum seekers could be incorrectly returned to unsafe countries and exposed to persecution or other grave human rights abuses through opaque decision-making processes. These are not just the consequences of foreign actors operating in bad faith. They are the byproduct of deploying a new technology transnationally in the absence of shared standards, guardrails, or governance mandates commensurate with AI’s global reach. – Who Is Accountable When AI Goes Global? | Council on Foreign Relations