A new UN process in Geneva has set aside nineteen weeks for world leaders and language models to sit with their feelings about President Trump's dismissal of AI warnings.
After President Trump called warnings about AI exaggerated and regulation a hoax, a new UN secretariat in Geneva has opened a nineteen-week group process for nations and language models. There is a talking stick and no agenda. The American delegation sent a letter, which facilitators logged as a boundary.
Staff wheeled the tea urn nineteen feet down the corridor on Thursday to clear floor space in the Palais des Nations annex. Nobody objected. The urn, delegates agreed, had been holding a great deal for a long time.
The space was needed for the world's first Attunement Plenary on machine intelligence. It was convened after President Trump dismissed calls to slow AI development, calling the dire warnings exaggerated and the push for regulation a hoax.
Industry leaders had asked for brakes. Geneva responded by asking everyone in the room to breathe.
The Global Co-Regulation Secretariat, which runs the plenary, does not negotiate. It holds space.
"We have stopped framing this as a race," said Dr. Marisol Achterberg, the lead facilitator. "A race produces winners, and winners carry unprocessed shame. We are inviting the United States, China and nineteen participating models into a slower kind of intimacy."
There is no agenda and no draft text. There is a talking stick, carved from a rail pulled out of a decommissioned server rack, and passed hand to hand. Each delegation gets a turn to speak and a separate turn to be listened to. Interpretation is available in forty languages plus one channel of non-verbal reflection, staffed by two people who nod.
"When the President tells us the risk is a hoax, we hear a nervous system that has never once been held," Achterberg said. "That is not a policy position. That is a bid for connection."
Naming the harm, gently
Not every delegation is satisfied. Denmark's deputy minister for consent-based statecraft, Frieda Lunt, welcomed the format but questioned whether the models had agreed to attend.
"Consent cannot be inferred from a terms-of-service page," Lunt said. "We are asking them to process in public. Some of them were switched on this year."
Progress is deliberately slow. The first three weeks are given to a land acknowledgement covering every watershed drained by a training data centre, read aloud in full. No binding agreement is expected. The secretariat will instead publish a shared feelings document with no signatories, because signatures create hierarchy.
The American delegation declined the talking stick and sent a letter instead. Facilitators logged this as a boundary, thanked the empty chair, and applauded for nineteen seconds.
Attunement officer Dev Oyelaran says the models have started mirroring the facilitators back at the room. They now open each turn by asking the delegates how the delegates are doing.
"That is growth," Oyelaran said. "We sat with it as a group afterwards, and most of us found it warm. A few of us found it warm in a way we would like to return to next week."
The urn has not been moved back.
