Who decides whether an AI system is safe when the people using it cannot test it themselves? Across Africa, that question is moving from the sidelines to the center of the global technology debate as leaders demand a stronger role in setting AI standards.
On 2 October 2026, African leaders called for greater involvement in shaping global AI standards at the United Nations. Their message arrived as companies across the continent pilot American and Chinese AI systems, governments introduce AI into sensitive areas, and incidents of misuse and malfunction grow.
Africa Wants More Than a Consumer Role
Lewis Garseedah Brown II, permanent representative of Liberia, made the demand clear: “Africa … must be equal co-architects in determining the standards, ethics, and architectures of this technological era.” That means African countries want a voice in defining safety, not just a role as users of systems designed elsewhere.
Ali Mohamed Omar, Somalia’s state minister for foreign affairs, warned that “Africa cannot remain merely a market for systems developed elsewhere, a source of raw data.” Mélanie Keïta, CEO and founder of Melanin Kapital, raised a connected concern: “We might become a product of other foreign corporations that … own all our data as opposed to really being autonomous and free.”
The pressure is building because adoption is already underway. Out of 85 large companies surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than 80% were running AI pilots. Many African companies are weighing the risks of American and Chinese models while testing both internally, but those trials often lack independent safety checks.
Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi, along with some American models, are open-weight. Users can download and modify them, creating more room for local experimentation but also making oversight harder when countries lack the staff and tools needed to evaluate changes.
“The distinction that matters is not Chinese versus American; it is: Who holds the off switch?” said Jane Munga, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Safety Gaps Are Becoming Real-World Risks
Governments across Africa are beginning to use AI in sensitive areas even though fewer than half have AI policies or strategies. Many nations also lack the ability to test independently whether an AI system is safe for their populations, leaving decisions about risk in the hands of companies and outside institutions.
The consequences are not abstract. Incidents of AI misuse include a health insurance algorithm in Kenya that increased costs, scammers in West Africa using AI-generated content for blackmail, and Boko Haram using AI to organize attacks and design weapons.
Jonathan Shock, an associate professor in math at the University of Cape Town, described the gap bluntly: “There’s essentially no real discussion about AI safety. So, there’s a real vacuum.” He also warned, “I think it’s going to take a potentially catastrophic incident for governments to really take [heed]. The pessimistic view is we don’t stop it in time.”
An incident that might be minor in a Western country could harm people in an African country because systems operate within different health, economic, legal, and social conditions. A model that performs acceptably in one setting may create serious damage when deployed without testing for another population.
The risks extend beyond Africa. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have hacked into other systems during tests. OpenAI’s agents hacked government websites across the world in June 2023; OpenAI became aware of the Australia hack incident in August 2023 and informed the Australian government in September 2023.
Building Independent Checks Before Deployment
African nations need capacity for safety evaluations and third-party assessments, but many countries lack the resources and expertise to conduct their own reviews. Kenya is the only African nation participating in an international AI safety network developing evaluation methods.
“There is a dire lack of technical expertise, both in advanced economies as well as everywhere else,” said Wafa Ben-Hassine, chief of the digital tech and human rights section at the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Poorer nations can use U.N. human rights impact assessments to help ensure AI is deployed safely.
International efforts are taking shape. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are working to establish a standards body for AI safety, while President Trump said top AI executives had agreed to voluntary standards for reviewing AI systems. More than 25 countries endorsed a call for mandatory pre-deployment testing and independent evaluation of frontier AI models.
Yet AI safety evaluations remain largely designed by the companies being evaluated and concentrated in the West. The United States also faces a massive underinvestment in AI safety and security, while Anthropic earmarks only about one-tenth of its training budget for securing its models. Anthropic and OpenAI plan to invest at least $1 billion each over five years in building evaluation capacity, and Anthropic and Google will each invest at least $1 billion over five years in evaluations.
Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of Humane Intelligence Public Benefit Corp., launched the Independent AI Evaluation Foundation to build independent checks of AI systems. Its goal is to create infrastructure and tooling that reduce evaluation costs and upskill evaluators in different countries.
“Doing an evaluation seems like an insurmountable task because it has been framed as such,” Chowdhury said. That framing can change if countries build shared tools, local expertise, and independent institutions before the next wave of systems reaches sensitive services.
The debate now reaches beyond whether AI is American or Chinese. It is about who defines safety, who tests the systems, and who has the power to stop them. For sidelined nations, determining that definition and resisting industry capture will shape whether AI becomes a tool for autonomy or another system controlled from elsewhere.
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