Building the Fourth International Geneva

Summary

This introduction explains why the AGI Preparedness Institute exists, why it is based in Geneva, and why it starts now. AGI preparedness means increasing the capacity of institutions to manage the societal, economic and geopolitical consequences of advanced AI, and corporate responsible scaling policies alone are not sufficient for that.

The core of the argument is about place. Ecosystems of institutions and people are surprisingly sticky: they create talent pipelines and tacit know-how that only diffuse locally. Geneva has been such an ecosystem for international governance for more than a century, and it has renewed itself with every new world order.

Four eras of International Geneva

1. The First International Geneva (from 1920). Geneva becomes the neutral home of the League of Nations, the first general-purpose multilateral organization. Weakened by the US refusal to join, it could not prevent the aggression of the 1930s.
2. The Second International Geneva (after 1945). High politics moves to New York, but the technical machinery of the postwar order condenses in Geneva: the UN’s European office, GATT, the World Health Organization, the revised Geneva Conventions, CERN. In the Cold War, neutrality makes Geneva one of the few tables where East and West both sit.
3. The Third International Geneva (after the Cold War). Globalization and multistakeholderism: the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum, public-private partnerships such as Gavi and the Global Fund, the Internet Governance Forum, and new institutions for human-centered security.
4. The Fourth International Geneva (the age of AGI). Today’s international organizations are not future-proof. But Geneva’s concentration of institutions and Switzerland’s stability and neutrality make it the logical place for the next round of self-renewal: adapting and building institutions for international coordination in the age of AGI.

The brief closes with the Institute’s first-year priorities on the road to the Geneva AI Summit in June 2027, and with ways to get involved.

Contents

• 1. Why AGI Preparedness, why Geneva, why now?
• 2. The AGI Preparedness Institute
• 3. Getting involved

How to cite

Comments to info@agipreparedness.org.