UN Launches Global AI Scientific Panel as Cyber Threats Escalate

When the United Nations General Assembly convened on February 12, the vote was nearly unanimous. Thirty-seven nations came together to approve the creation of something unprecedented: a global scientific body tasked with understanding artificial intelligence’s sweeping impacts on humanity. Only two countries—the United States and Paraguay—stood in opposition.

The moment marked a turning point in how the world confronts AI. For years, governments have scrambled to keep pace with breakthroughs that reshape economies, labor markets, and security landscapes. Now, for the first time, an internationally sanctioned body will attempt to separate AI’s genuine promises from its most troubling risks.

“The panel will act as an early-warning system and evidence engine, helping distinguish between hype and reality.” — United Nations announcement

A Climate Change Model for AI Governance

The new Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence draws immediate comparisons to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body that has guided global climate policy for over three decades. Like its environmental predecessor, the AI panel won’t set policy or impose regulations. Instead, it will synthesize research and produce policy-relevant reports that shape how governments understand the technology.

Scope and representation distinguish this effort from earlier initiatives. The panel’s 40 members hail from 37 nations, selected from more than 2,600 candidates through a rigorous review process. They include prominent researchers like Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist and AI safety advocate, alongside industry figures such as Jian Wang of Alibaba Cloud and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.

Geographic diversity represents a deliberate strength. Members from Mexico, the Philippines, Uganda, and beyond bring perspectives that Western-centric AI discussions often miss. Language models perform worse on low-resource languages. AI’s labor market impacts vary dramatically across economies. The panel’s international makeup, observers note, will lend its findings legitimacy that narrower bodies cannot match.

Breadth of inquiry extends far beyond safety concerns. The panel will examine AI’s economic, social, cultural, and developmental dimensions—topics that previous initiatives have touched only lightly. Wendy Hall, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton who advised on the panel’s formation, emphasizes that its reports will be “broad ranging—not just safety.”

“The impacts of AI are highly context dependent. AI will affect each country’s labor markets differently.” — Brian Tse, Concordia AI

The Security Crisis Unfolding in Parallel

While diplomats debated the panel’s formation, a parallel crisis was accelerating. IBM’s X-Force security researchers published their 2026 Threat Intelligence Index this week, and the findings paint a sobering picture: AI isn’t just reshaping economies—it’s arming cybercriminals with unprecedented capabilities.

Attack velocity has increased dramatically. X-Force observed a 44% surge in attacks exploiting public-facing applications, driven largely by AI-enabled vulnerability discovery. Attackers aren’t developing new techniques; they’re using AI to find and exploit existing weaknesses faster than defenders can patch them.

Ransomware ecosystems are fragmenting and multiplying. Active ransomware and extortion groups surged 49% year-over-year, with smaller operators launching low-volume campaigns that complicate attribution. Leaked tooling and AI-automated operations have collapsed barriers to entry, allowing transient groups to enter and exit the threat landscape with disturbing ease.

Supply chain pressure continues mounting. Large third-party compromises have nearly quadrupled since 2020 as attackers exploit trust relationships in software development pipelines. With AI-powered coding tools accelerating software creation—and occasionally introducing unvetted code—security teams face an expanding attack surface.

AI-specific vulnerabilities are emerging as a distinct category. Infostealer malware exposed over 300,000 ChatGPT credentials in 2025, signaling that AI platforms now carry the same credential risks as core enterprise SaaS solutions. Compromised chatbot credentials enable attackers to manipulate outputs, exfiltrate sensitive data, or inject malicious prompts.

“Attackers aren’t reinventing playbooks, they’re speeding them up with AI. The core issue is the same: businesses are overwhelmed by software vulnerabilities. The difference now is speed.” — Mark Hughes, IBM Cybersecurity Services

The Convergence of Two Crises

The timing is not coincidental. The UN panel’s launch and IBM’s security report arrive as AI capabilities advance on multiple fronts simultaneously. Multimodal models can now process text, images, and code with increasing sophistication. Agentic systems can execute complex tasks with minimal human oversight. These advances carry both promise and peril.

North American organizations now face the highest attack rates in six years, accounting for 29% of incidents observed by X-Force. Manufacturing remains the most targeted sector for the fifth consecutive year. Meanwhile, nation-state tactics are bleeding into financially motivated attacks as techniques spread through underground forums and AI streamlines reconnaissance.

The UN panel’s three-year mandate begins at a pivotal moment. Its first reports will land as AI systems become more capable, more autonomous, and more deeply embedded in critical infrastructure. The challenge isn’t merely technical—it’s governance at a global scale, coordination across competing national interests, and the fundamental question of who bears responsibility when AI systems cause harm.

For security professionals, the path forward requires shifting from reactive to proactive defense. Agentic-powered threat detection, stronger authentication controls, and conditional access policies represent necessary adaptations. But individual organizations can only do so much when facing adversaries armed with AI and operating across borders.

The coming months will test whether international coordination can match the speed of technological change. The UN panel provides a forum for evidence-based discussion. Whether that translates into effective action remains the open question that will define AI’s trajectory through the remainder of this decade.

This article was reported by the ArtificialDaily editorial team. For more information, visit Nature and IBM Newsroom.