Compromise in multilateral negotiations and the global regulation of artificial intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spread worldwide, international discussions have increasingly focused on their consequences for democracy, human rights, fundamental freedoms, security, and economic and social development. In this context, UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted in November 2021, has emerged as the first global normative framework for AI development and deployment. The intense negotiations of every detail of the document brought forth numerous controversies among UNESCO member states. Drawing on a unique set of primary sources, including written positions and recorded deliberations, this article explains the achievement of global compromise on AI regulation despite the multiplicity of UNESCO member-state positions representing a variety of liberal and sovereignist preferences. Building upon Boltanski's pragmatic sociology, it conceptualizes the practice of multilateral negotiations and attributes the multilateral fragile agreements to two embedded therein compromises: Structural normative hybridity and situated normative ambiguity allowed to accomplish a compromise by linking macro-normative structures with situated debates of multilateral negotiations.