If You're Wondering What Can Be Done About AI, Start Here

A response to Bill Gates's call for an international AI framework, and a practical way for nations and AI companies to reach one

Millions of us now use AI every day. Many of us have started asking a harder question: is anyone steering this, and what could we actually do about it?

On August 26, 2026, Bill Gates gave a clear answer to the first part. He called out the world for having no plan and argued that the highest priority is creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI. He proposed a new international organization modelled on nuclear weapons inspections, aviation rules and the ozone treaties. He also acknowledged that the geopolitical environment makes coordinated action exceptionally difficult.

We agree with his diagnosis. This post is about the part that is still missing: how an agreement like that actually gets made.

Why hasn't anyone fixed this already?

Every major government regulating frontier AI is doing so cautiously, and the reason has little to do with will. The first country to impose serious obligations bears the cost alone, while the development it constrains simply moves elsewhere. Each nation, and each AI company, fears being disadvantaged if it adopts costly safety measures while competitors do not. That is not timidity. It is a rational response to a genuine collective action problem, and good intentions alone won't break it.

A second obstacle is less obvious. Even when an agreement exists that would leave every party better off, negotiations over many competing interests often fail to find it. Bargaining issue by issue, with each side defending its own draft, tends to miss the trades that would make a deal work.

What is the solution to the AI coordination problem?

Our proposal combines two tools, one for each obstacle.

The first is the Simultaneous Policy mechanism, known as Simpol. Participating governments commit to implement agreed measures together, on the same date. No one accepts a first-mover disadvantage, and purely domestic policy remains a national matter. Simpol has spent more than two decades building this mechanism and applying it to tax cooperation and climate policy. Along the way it has built a base of legislators who have committed in principle to simultaneous implementation.

The second is Smartsettle Infinity, a multi-issue negotiation system. It places the whole package into a single negotiating framework and elicits each party's priorities privately. It then searches for combinations that leave every party better off than the status quo, using a criterion called Maximize the Minimum Gain, which raises the least-satisfied party as far as possible. This lets a party concede something it values less in exchange for something it values more, and trades that haggling never reaches become visible.

In short, one tool makes it safe to go first, and the other reveals the agreement that makes moving forward worthwhile.

What would a global AI safety agreement actually contain?

Our working document sets out a candidate package built around a levy on frontier AI compute. Compute is the one part of AI development that can be observed from outside. Training a frontier model requires physically identifiable chips, data centres and electricity, which can be metered and audited without seeing a line of code.

The levy would fund two things. The first is independent verification of safety claims, because today almost every framework relies on companies reporting on themselves. The second is capacity-building and affordable AI access for countries that do not host frontier development. For scale: the main existing industry fund for safety work has raised just over $10 million. By contrast, independent analysts estimate AI infrastructure spending by the largest US cloud providers at $550 to $800 billion in 2026. Even a 0.1% levy on that base would be 55 to 80 times larger than today's fund.

What each party gets matters as much as what it pays. The United States and China each want verified assurance that the other is subject to the same testing regime, and neither can get that by acting alone. AI companies could receive mutual recognition of audits across jurisdictions, or a cap on liability in a market where insurers are withdrawing cover. Smaller nations gain access and a seat in governance.

Whether the instrument should go further is itself on the table. Options range from funding verification alone to empowering a recommendation to pause development in extreme cases. Gates wrote that if someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, he would likely support it. A negotiation that treats the purpose of the instrument as a variable is how you find out which versions of such a plan every indispensable party can accept.

We are explicit that every figure in our proposal (see below) is a starting point for negotiation, not a conclusion. The proposal does not ask anyone to accept our numbers. It proposes the process by which the numbers get determined.

Has this approach worked before?

In a simulated global climate negotiation, six stakeholder groups used Smartsettle to reach an optimized consensus. That consensus left every bloc better off than the status quo, which the consensus procedure then in use could not find. The results were published by the Toda Peace Institute as Policy Brief No. 287 in March 2026, and you can watch the 20-minute video here. The conclusion was that the "multipolar trap" in climate comes from the negotiating procedure, not from the underlying interests. We think the same question is worth asking of AI.

What happens next?

The next step is a bounded demonstration with six modelled parties: the United States, China, the European Union and United Kingdom, a coalition of countries without frontier AI, the frontier laboratories, and the cloud and chip providers who would collect the levy. Preferences will be modelled from public positions and labelled as such. The results will be published whatever they show, including a finding that no package works for some parties.

What can I do about AI risk?

If you work inside frontier AI, we most need you to test the open questions in our working document, because they cannot be answered from outside. If you are a legislator, we ask for support in principle for the Simultaneous Policy pledge, which commits you to a process, not to any specific policy. If you represent a foundation or an institution with standing in multilateral affairs, we invite you to support or host the demonstration on the neutrality terms set out in the document. And if you are simply someone who uses AI and wants it to go well, share this with someone who can do one of those things.

[Download the working document: Negotiating a Global AI Safety Package (PDF) (coming shortly]

Correspondence is welcome at info@smartsettle.com or through simpol.org.