As geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and rapid advances in frontier AI converge, the governance of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has moved from a speculative concern to a central priority for global institutions.

Over the past year, leading researchers, including Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and whistleblowers such as William Saunders, have warned U.S. lawmakers that AGI may emerge within the next three to five years. Across multiple U.S. Senate hearings, lawmakers from both parties have compared the risks of advanced AI systems to nuclear proliferation and other national‑security threats.

This domestic urgency mirrors a broader global shift. In March 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted its first resolution on artificial intelligence, urging all 193 member states to pursue “safe, secure, and trustworthy” AI development. The UN’s High‑Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence later emphasized that 118 countries currently have no meaningful role in shaping AI governance, despite being among the most vulnerable to its impacts.

Against this backdrop, The Millennium Project, co‑founded by futurist and executive director Jerome C. Glenn, has released Global Governance of the Transition to Artificial General Intelligence, which presents the most extensive international assessment to date of how the world should manage the transition from today’s narrow AI to future AGI systems.

Contributors include leading thinkers such as Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio, and dozens of AGI researchers across the U.S., EU, China, and other major AI‑developing regions. Daniel Faggella, CEO and Head of Research at Emerj, contributed as a respondent, placing Emerj directly within the global governance dialogue.

For enterprise leaders, this isn’t just a policy debate; it’s a preview of the regulatory moats and compute-access hurdles that will define the next five years of R&D.

This article focuses on two chapters of the book with the most immediate implications for enterprise leaders:

• Managing International Cooperation Amidst an AGI Arms Race: Corporate coalitions must lead where governments lag to stabilize supply chains and prevent proprietary lock-in.
• Evaluating Options for Successful AGI Governance: Enterprise leaders should leverage the 51% expert consensus to build regulatory moats through proactive safety audits.

Managing International Cooperation Amidst an AGI Arms Race

Amid accelerating US-China AGI competition, where secret bilateral talks reveal governments cannot match deployment timelines, corporations emerge as decisive governance actors. Enterprise coalitions must create Nash equilibria that demonstrate that joint R&D outperforms escalation, while interoperability standards prevent proprietary lock-in across global AGI ecosystems.

Three corporate strategies from The Millennium Project’s book that CEOs must champion:​

• Collaborative R&D: Joint R&D demonstrates that cooperation generates superior returns compared to an arms race​.
• Interoperability Standards: Staged bilateral to multilateral treaties block proprietary AGI silos​.
• Compute Access: Blockchain frameworks commoditize compute access, preventing state monopolies.

CEOs must lead multistakeholder forums where corporate agreements evolve faster than government processes, build joint R&D partnerships that prove economic cooperation beats defection, and establish interoperability standards that secure enterprise access to AGI infrastructure.​

Evaluating Options for Successful AGI Governance

The Millennium Project presents 299 futurists’ ratings of concrete governance models for AGI emergence. While options vary from UN agencies to multistakeholder bodies, the underlying message is clear: CEOs must influence certification frameworks now or risk exclusion from AGI infrastructure.

Three frameworks from The Millennium Project’s Delphi that CEOs must influence:

• TransInstitution Model (51% support): Multistakeholder body partnered with ANI systems enforcing human-led rules, specifically designed to prevent Big Tech or government AGI monopolies.
• AGI Agency (47% Delphi effectiveness): Certifies national licensing procedures for nonmilitary AGI, requiring continuous safety audits before systems connect to the internet, unlike static nuclear oversight models.
• Compute Centralization (42% rating): Limits most powerful AI training/inference chips to international computing centers under treaty-based symmetric access rights, critical for enterprises outside US/China dominance.

Enterprise leaders must pilot licensing compliance now by testing AGI prototypes against Delphi benchmarks such as provable alignment and audit trails, and by building regulatory moats in regulated sectors like finance and healthcare.

​CEOs should lobby for symmetric access treaties ensuring compliant corporations gain compute and chip rights, avoiding US-China exclusion from AGI infrastructure. Finally, leaders must stress-test centralization scenarios in which 51% favor decentralized models, blocking single-entity dominance and positioning agile enterprises ahead of non-compliant competitors.

The goal for the CEO today is not just to comply, but to help write the rules that ensure your enterprise isn’t locked out of the next generation of compute.