The world’s leading telecommunications body is currently establishing a new international Focus Group to shape the technical rules governing how artificial intelligence operates in cities. It is a relatively obscure body, but one that could have significant influence over how those rules develop. Its first meeting concludes today.
To date, the United States holds zero leadership positions in the body overseeing this work. U.S. cities, the communities that are proactively shaping their own AI policies and will live under whatever framework emerges, are not formally represented. Meanwhile, Chinese state enterprises, government agencies, and Huawei, hold many of the roles responsible for drafting the documents that can become global standards.
Most of the oxygen in the U.S.-China tech debate is consumed by semiconductors and AI dominance. But winning the AI race is not just about who builds the most powerful models. It is also about who writes the rules those models will operate under. As written by former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, “Standards and governance matter just as much as hardware.” One of the most consequential battlegrounds for global standard-setting is the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
The ITU has been a bipartisan priority. ITU Secretary General Doreen Bogdan-Martin was nominated by the Biden administration and enthusiastically supported for re-election by the Trump administration in 2025. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have actively pursued U.S. leadership at the highest levels, recognizing that the rules governing emerging technologies are themselves a form of geopolitical power. Yet this pattern of engagement does not extend into the ITU’s technical Study Groups, which are the bodies that drive ITU’s work on global standardization by developing rules and guidelines that become formalized international norms.
For the body focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart sustainable cities and communities, that pen is held primarily by representatives from China in ITU Study Group 20 (SG20), the body focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart sustainable cities and communities. The United States holds no formal leadership roles in this body. Chinese representatives hold a formal leadership role for all eleven sub-priorities of SG20, giving them considerable sway over the group’s agenda and outcomes—including work on security, privacy, and trustworthiness.
At the May meeting in Geneva, SG20 established a new ITU Focus Group on AI for Smart Sustainable Cities and Communities, a pre-standardization body that will define frameworks for how AI integrates into urban systems. While this may sound like fairly technical telecommunications policy, the questions under consideration could ultimately affect how cities deploy AI in practice. The Focus Group’s mandate includes issues such as how AI-enabled traffic systems interact with emergency response, when automated energy or water systems should require human oversight, and how governments assess the safety and performance of AI systems against emerging international benchmarks.
The Focus Group will grapple with the convergence of digital and physical urban environments, where spatial AI merges a city’s infrastructure with its digital representation. These technical questions often become political and economic realities when the answers determine what systems can talk to one another, what technologies cities can buy, how governments assess risk, and which companies are best positioned to compete. Whoever shapes these standards will influence the architecture of 21st-century urban life.
At a time when so much of the U.S.’s national discourse is occupied with an AI race with China, this is an extraordinary gap to leave exposed. For the last century, much of U.S. hard power and technological dominance was solidified by pairing world-leading technological innovation with soft power influence over the norms and standards that developed around U.S.-made technology. Today, the U.S. is building some of the most powerful AI systems in the world while leaving the governance architecture surrounding them to others.
Skeptics who believe that multilateralism is waning or even dead because of weak enforcement mechanisms forget that, in nascent fields like AI, normative efforts are incredibly powerful. The foundations of the internet were set through a series of consensus-based decisions made early in its development, and yet such early protocols persist to this day, governing how billions of people access vital digital infrastructure, for example the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP).
The ITU Study Group 20 and new Focus Group offers an opportunity for the U.S. to increase its substantive role in shaping ITU policy, immediately. The technical framework written today becomes the operating system of cities housing billions of people tomorrow. AI is developing alongside a massive increase in urbanization globally, and the technology will default to alignment with the standards used by international markets and infrastructure suppliers. The best practices and minimum interoperability requirements established by this Focus Group will likely be codified and multiplied across every region of the world where cities are being built or rebuilt with AI at their core.
The U.S. should act on multiple fronts simultaneously.
First, the State Department should actively pursue formal leadership roles within SG20. At the same time, it should mobilize the private sector and local governments for engagement in the new Focus Group.
Second, Washington should invite representatives from tech firms that have investments relevant to this discussion – smart devices, maps, self-driving cars, and frontier AI.
Third, and most importantly, American cities should have a seat at the table. Mayors and local officials are already making practical decisions about how AI and emerging technologies are used in areas like public safety, transportation, infrastructure, permitting, and service delivery. That engagement is beginning to take shape. Jaime Wascalus, CIO of Saint Paul and a leader of the GovAI Coalition—a network of more than 900 public agencies focused on responsible public-sector AI—plans to participate in the Focus Group’s first meeting in Tampere, Finland, on September 10–11. GovAI’s involvement offers an early model for how U.S. cities can bring practitioner experience directly into the international standards process.
The U.S. has leading technology firms, technical expertise, and cities already working through standards-setting in practice. Ensuring that American cities and other democratic governments are represented in these forums can help make sure emerging standards reflect not only technical priorities, but democratic values and the experience of institutions accountable to the public.
