IGF 2026 WS #439 Beyond Compute: Sustaining the Commons that Power AI

Description

AI is fracturing the collaborative foundation of the internet. For decades, freely licensed content, data, and code - the knowledge commons - have been a shared resource that people and institutions could freely draw on to advance scientific research, education, innovation, and public services. Attribution, participation, and financial support flowed back into the commons, attracting contributors, strengthening communities, and sustaining the infrastructure on which everyone relied. AI development has benefitted from this relationship, particularly from the work of open communities. As AI grows as an industry, however, this reciprocal cycle has begun to break. Content is systematically scraped from the commons and served back to users via AI-powered applications, imposing significant costs on commons infrastructures while disintermediating users from contributor communities. This weakens the reciprocal dynamics which have historically supported the knowledge commons: attribution, participation, and support. Despite their importance to AI development and governance, little attention has been paid to sustaining the human knowledge infrastructure on which these systems depend.

This session convenes researchers, policymakers, and stewards of the knowledge commons to ask: What collective responsibility do governments, industry, researchers, and civil society share for sustaining the knowledge commons? Should these resources be understood as critical digital infrastructure? Research will demonstrate how the AI boom is accelerating extraction from the commons, complemented by case studies from commons stewards already deploying strategies to counter this extraction. Regional examples will underscore how knowledge commons are currently used to support essential public service initiatives, as well as the feasibility of various policy approaches, governance models, and historical precedents that can help sustain the commons. The commons have always been a collective endeavour; this session invites participants to evaluate the effectiveness of current counter-strategies adopted by commons stewards and define a practical policy agenda to sustain knowledge commons as critical digital infrastructure.

Policy Question(s)

How should governments and international bodies define and resource the knowledge commons as critical digital infrastructure in National AI Strategies and Digital Public Infrastructure frameworks?
What shared responsibilities—financial, technical, or legal—should AI developers and commercial platforms hold to prevent the depletion of public knowledge ecosystems?
How can emerging AI governance frameworks balance the goal of innovation with the need to safeguard the long-term human infrastructure that powers it?

Expected Outcomes

Participants will leave with a shared understanding of how artificial intelligence is reshaping the relationships that have sustained the knowledge commons, and why this presents a new governance challenge. The discussion will inform ongoing policy work by participating organizations on AI governance, digital public infrastructure, and the knowledge commons, while fostering new cross-sector collaborations. Recommendations from the session will be documented in a publicly available summary and taken forward by stewards of the project into discussions with the OECD, Digital Public Goods Alliance annual meeting, and Global Partnership on AI via the VIADUCT project.

Format

Roundtable Duration (minutes): 90 Format description: Seating participants around a common table will encourage active exchange between researchers, governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and stewards of the knowledge commons, allowing participants to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and identify shared priorities. The 90-minute format provides sufficient time to establish a common understanding of the issue before moving into an interactive discussion on practical policy approaches. By prioritizing dialogue over prepared statements, the session will leverage the diversity of the IGF community to explore how collective responsibility for sustaining the knowledge commons can be translated into concrete governance action.

Hybrid Format

Hybrid Format: The session will be facilitated as a fully integrated hybrid roundtable, with onsite and online participants treated as equal contributors throughout the discussion. A moderator will guide the conversation while a dedicated online moderator will monitor the virtual platform, surface questions, and ensure remote participants are regularly invited into the discussion. The dedicated time for this session, as well as the roundtable format, enable questions and comments to be woven throughout the session from both online and onsite participants. This is an important feature to encourage genuine dialogue across stakeholder groups. The entire second half of the session will be dedicated to inviting participants to contribute policy ideas and examples through an interactive guided discussion. The discussion will allow insights from both audiences to shape the discussion and be reflected in the session summary.

Organizers

Organizer 1: Rachel Judhistari, Wikimedia Foundation

Speakers

Speaker 1: Philip Thigo Thigo, Government, African Group Speaker 2: Rachel Judhistari, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group Speaker 3: Amrita Choudhury, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group

Moderator

Rachel Judhistari, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group

Online Moderator

Amrita Choudhury, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group

Rapporteur