At a UN AI briefing on Wednesday, July 1, the UN’s independent scientific panel on artificial intelligence stressed the need for a shared global body of evidence on the technology, saying science and compassion should guide efforts to understand AI’s benefits and risks. Panel co-chairs Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa, during a briefing led by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, said a common knowledge base was needed to support evidence-driven policymaking. Guterres noted, “The more AI advances without shared rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome.” Bengio said the preliminary report’s importance as an evidence base, adding that “the decisions made about AI today will have lasting consequences for individuals, businesses, institutions, and even democracy at large,” but that “science and compassion must remain our compass.” Ressa said the report “is the best available evidence, at this moment, in a field that changes faster than any of us can write about it.” She added that “the hardest part was not the differences between nations” and that “science gave us a common language that politics often cannot.” When asked about increasing the evidence base, Bengio explained that more societal attention and investment into independent study into the impacts of AI could help, noting that “most of the money in AI is in priva” (cut off).