On Monday, September 21, with the high-level week of the 81st UN General Assembly (UNGA81) underway in New York, OSI Executive Director Duane O’Brien spoke on a UN panel about Open Source AI and joined a Creative Commons symposium on openness and digital sovereignty. The OSI also attended the inaugural 50-in-5 Awards for digital public infrastructure. Different people filled each room, but many of them were circling the same question: what does openness give people, and what does it take to make good on it?
At the Creative Commons event, Duane offered a ten-word answer: “Open by itself does very little but enables a lot.” Creative Commons later called it the line of the day. Most of what the OSI said at UNGA81 was about the distance between the two halves of that sentence.
Shared definitions for Open Source AI #
At UN Digital Cooperation Day, organized by the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET), Duane joined the panel “What is Open Source AI? Applications, Strategies and Global Cooperation.” Sarah Myers West of the AI Now Institute moderated a conversation with Duane, Kari Briski of NVIDIA, Marzieh Fadaee of Cohere Labs, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, and Rumman Chowdhury of Humane Intelligence.
West put the first question to Duane. Governments are starting to negotiate language about Open Source AI for the UN’s Global Dialogue on AI Governance, so what should delegates consider, and what happens if the terms go undefined? Duane started with history. As Open Source software took hold, some companies wanted its good reputation and attached the label to products that restricted the freedoms to use, study, modify, and share. The OSI’s work on which licenses qualify turned “Open Source” into shorthand the whole industry understood. It’s the reason a lawyer can tell you whether a given license is Open Source. AI brought the same pressure back. “You need these kinds of common definitions when you’re crafting policy,” he said, “or else everyone is speaking a completely different language.”
He was just as direct about how the OSI arrived at the Open Source AI Definition. As he described it, the OSI’s role is to convene the global community and help it reach consensus. Over two years, that meant workshops and conversations in 18 countries, plus online town halls, before version 1.0 was published in October 2024. The Open Source AI Fellowship, launched in June with Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, is now looking at how well the definition serves the people who use it and who was missing from those first conversations. Duane reminded the room that the Open Source Definition took about ten years to settle into the principles we rely on today. The AI definition is still early in that process.
Governments are already putting that work to use. During the Member State interventions, France’s Ambassador for Digital Affairs pointed to the G7 Vision on AI Openness, which G7 digital ministers adopted in May under the French presidency after the OSI helped draft it as a knowledge partner. The ambassador asked that the work inform the UN’s Global Dialogue and called the UN a natural forum for making those principles universal. After years spent on definitions, it was good to hear a government ask for exactly that.
Questions from the floor went to the hard parts. Asked how open models deal with data that can’t be released, Duane explained that the Open Source AI Definition requires developers to release the data they can and accurately describe the data they can’t, and that the G7 vision made that language stronger.
Near the end, a delegate asked the panel what to tell their child about Open Source and AI. Zemlin said, “Be a maker, not a user.” Duane said Open Source technologies are “built by the people who show up,” and that kids should feel included in that.
Openness and sovereignty at Open @ UNGA81 #
Creative Commons and the NYU Engelberg Center hosted Open @ UNGA81, a day of conversation about what openness can and can’t do for communities and countries pursuing digital sovereignty. In her recap of the event, Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir draws out a few themes. Openness widens people’s choices, and sovereignty depends on having the capacity to use those choices and keep them over time.
Duane joined the Open Source panel with Amanda Casari of Google Open Source Programs Office, Madiha Zahrah Choksi of Columbia University, Ben Moskowitz of Two Planets, and Ilan Strauss of AI Disclosures Project. The panel looked at how market forces shape Open Source and how Open Source can reshape markets and public infrastructure in return. When the conversation kept circling back to whether openness would cause or prevent particular outcomes, Duane named its limits. Openness brings transparency and reproducibility, he said, but no go-to-market strategy of its own, and people who love open technology sometimes lose sight of that. The line of the day came out of that exchange.
Asked what it would take for open alternatives to flourish, he pointed to Linux, which got where it is through decades of sustained investment. Thirty years ago, he said, it seemed inconceivable that anyone could compete with the incumbents, just as it once seemed impossible to disrupt Unix or unseat Internet Explorer. “If we want these kinds of markets to flourish in Europe or anywhere,” he said, “we have to invest in creating those markets.” Creative Commons reached a similar conclusion in its recap, arguing that maintainers and shared infrastructure belong in public funding strategies.
The Open Source AI Definition came up twice during the panel, including a researcher’s question about whether one definition can cover both reproducing a model and reusing it. Duane acknowledged that the definition “is not without criticism” and that a lot has changed since it was published. Then he invited anyone who wants a say in its future to get involved, because the OSI will begin those conversations soon.
Digital public infrastructure at the 50-in-5 Awards #
The inaugural 50-in-5 Awards, held at The Morgan Library & Museum, recognized countries and people building digital public infrastructure (DPI). The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) coordinated the ceremony with Co-Develop as part of 50-in-5, a country-led campaign to help 50 countries launch and scale parts of their DPI by 2028.
The winners showed what DPI looks like at national scale. Benin took the Impact Award for an integrated system that has registered nearly 13.75 million people, about 99% of its population, and connects more than 60 government entities through a national interoperability platform. Indonesia won the Collaboration Award for QRIS Cross-Border, a payment system that works across seven countries and supports more than 45 million businesses, most of them micro, small, and medium enterprises. The Leadership Award went to Esther Dweck, Brazil’s Minister of Management and Innovation in Public Services, whose government used GOV.BR and PIX to deliver emergency assistance to flood-affected communities in as little as six days. Italy used the ceremony to announce it was joining as the campaign’s 40th country.
For the OSI, the connection is concrete. Under the DPG Standard, software qualifies as a digital public good only if it carries an OSI-approved license, so every software DPG rests on licenses reviewed against the Open Source Definition. When countries build DPI with digital public goods, they are building on Open Source as the community has defined it. In the OSI’s September members newsletter, Duane named the DPGA among the organizations the OSI is working with as AI tools test licenses and processes built for software.
What comes next #
Much of what UNGA81 asked of the Open Source community is slow work: refining definitions, describing data honestly, reviewing licenses, and finding money for the people who maintain shared infrastructure. The OSI will keep bringing the community’s experience into rooms where governments set AI and digital policy, and we’d like more of you in those conversations.
If you want a voice in the next phase of the Open Source AI Definition, watch this blog for upcoming conversations, or find us at the OSI track at All Things Open in Raleigh on October 20. If you’d like to support the OSI’s policy work, you can become a member or donate.
References #
- [Video recording of UN Digital Cooperation Day](https://www.youtube.com/live/N5kfbHeqChE?t=1422)
- [Transcript of UN Digital Cooperation Day](https://opensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Digital_Cooperation_Day_2026.pdf)
- [Transcript of Open @ UNGA81](https://opensource.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Open_UNGA81.pdf)