Page 61 - The Annual AI Governance Report 2025 Steering the Future of AI

The Annual AI Governance Report 2025: Steering the Future of AI

1.8 Inequality and Emerging Divides

The global context is marked by growing divides. Lacina Koné (Director General and Chief
Executive Officer, Smart Africa) said that the AI divide is fundamentally an extension of the
existing broadband and digital divide, with 2.6 billion people still unconnected globally.
His Holiness Pope Leo XIV’s message also pointed out that “Connecting the human family
through telegraph, radio, telephone, digital and space communications presents challenges,
particularly in rural and low-income areas, where approximately 2.6 billion persons still lack
access to communication technologies.”

Mr Koné warned that the lack of connectivity is a "dignity gap," and beyond coverage, the
"usage gap" due to affordability, device cost, local content, and cyber hygiene prevents people
from utilizing existing infrastructure. He emphasized the urgency of acting, stating, "Time is not
on our side."

Compute access and data centers, already concentrated in a handful of corporations and
countries, risks becoming another digital divide. Without access to advanced chips, cloud
infrastructure, and high-quality datasets, many countries might be left as passive consumers of
AI, unable to shape its trajectory.

H.E. Abdullah Amer Alswaha (Minister of Communications & Information Technology, Saudi
Arabia) pointed to an algorithmic divide: a few entities dictate AI biases and hallucinations.

Figure 10: H�E� Eng� Abdullah Amer Alswaha, Minister, Ministry of Communications
& Information Technology, Saudi Arabia

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