Ambassador (ret.) Christopher Lu was not formally trained as a diplomat, but his career working across the three branches of the U.S. government provided him with the experience needed to succeed as a senior figure in critical diplomatic negotiations. His time in public service as Deputy Secretary of Labor, White House Cabinet Secretary and Assistant to the President, as counsel for a Congressional committee, and other roles in government provided Amb. Lu with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed as a diplomat. Amb. Lu led the United Nations General Assembly’s first agreement on artificial intelligence (AI), as well as work on Global Digital Compact, which demonstrated U.S. leadership on emerging technology. His distinguished career provides lessons on how broad professional experiences can be utilized in the field of diplomacy.
Transcript
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Interviewer: You went from working as the Deputy Secretary for Labor in the Obama administration, among other important roles, to serving as Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations for Management and Reform. Can you explain how your career prior to serving at the UN informed the work you did in that role?
Amb. Lu: I’ve been blessed to have a 20-year career in the federal government. I’ve worked in all three branches. I’ve been in the House, the Senate, the White House. I’ve run a cabinet department. And I think the specialty that I have, to the extent that I had one, was managing complex organizations, driving change, overseeing budgets — and in some sense that was the job that I had at the U.S. Mission to the UN. The section that I oversaw was in charge of negotiating the UN budget. And so, we represent the U.S. during those negotiations. The U.S. is the largest financial contributor.
We were also in charge of overseeing the management of UN programs to make sure that they were delivering good services for the American people. And in a sense, that’s kind of the culmination of all the work I had done on the domestic level. I did have to learn foreign policy, I did have to learn the intricacies of the UN, but having spent so long in government before, I was very used to picking up new topic areas, and I was fortunately blessed with an amazing staff, incredible colleagues who were patient and helped me learn along the way.
Interviewer: While at the United Nations, you led the General Assembly resolution on artificial intelligence governance. How does one work with 120 different countries to reach consensus? What did that process look like?
Amb. Lu: So, while my day job was involved in leading U.S. budget negotiations, part of my portfolio was management and reform. The reform part of that portfolio is helping the United Nations address new challenges, new issues, and one of those issues is artificial intelligence. So, taking a step back even before the advent of ChatGPT in November of 2022, the Biden administration—under which I served—had been really thinking about what should be those norms, what should be the guardrails for artificial intelligence? And so back in 2022, the Biden administration put out a blueprint for AI Bill of Rights. Through 2023, the administration had worked with a lot of U.S. private sector tech companies on voluntary guidelines.
So, all of that culminated with an executive order in the Fall of 2023 about what responsible AI looks like. So, those were standards that were going to govern what we did here in the United States. But what’s important to understand about something like AI, both the opportunities and the challenges don’t stop at a nation’s borders. So, if you really truly wanted to put those guardrails — those norms — in place, you had to do them in an international setting and there’s no better setting than the United Nations. So, really over the course of six months in the fall of 2023 and in the early part of 2024, we worked intensively to take some of these basic concepts about transparency, about accountability, about ethics, human rights, sustainability, development, and incorporate them into a UN resolution.
I will say, even in the best of times trying to get 193 countries, which is the membership of the UN, to agree on anything is very, very difficult. And it was a laborious process; diplomacy, again, even in the best of times, is very hard, it takes time, it requires a lot of compromises. And what made this issue particularly challenging is that the development right now in the regulation of AI really involves a couple of handfuls of countries: It’s the Western countries, the United States, China, and some others. So, you were talking about an issue that mattered intensively to a small number of countries, but would ultimately affect every country in the world and trying in the end to get all of those countries on board with a resolution was a challenging feat. But in March of 2024, we reached consensus; all 193 countries agreed to it, and that really was a landmark accomplishment. For the first time, the United Nations issued a resolution on safe, secure, trustworthy artificial intelligence, and those would basically be the principles, the ground rules, for how the international community would look at artificial intelligence. And as importantly as other countries along the way started coming up with their own national governance and regulatory regimes, those words in the UN resolution would basically form the foundation of that. So, this was a landmark accomplishment. It’s something that I’m very proud of. And while I’m here taking credit for it, I had a phenomenal team of people in New York and Washington who really took the laboring oar on all of this.
Interviewer: The work you did on AI and the Global Digital Compact was cutting edge – addressing rapidly evolving issues that at times might seem inaccessible to the general public. What would you say to the American people about how this work advanced US interests?
Amb. Lu: Artificial intelligence really has the impact to transform our society in a way comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, the Computer Revolution of the mid-1900s, the advent of the Internet, but it will only do that if we do that in a responsible way. And so part of what we were trying to do is ensure that the applications of AI, whether it’s for improving health, alleviating poverty, improving education, helping people find jobs, skilling people for jobs – all of those benefits would flow equally, not just to the people, like in the United States who have the advantages of living in an industrialized country, but have the impact, have the ability to impact everyone around the world. The challenge is that there are significant inequalities in people’s access to technology. One third of the people in the world don’t have regular access to the Internet. So, if you don’t have access to the Internet, AI is far, far away. So, the goal really here was to make those benefits widely available, to help bridge some of these digital divides, build capacity in other countries so that they could also take advantage of them, while also recognizing some of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence; whether its ability to create misinformation, disinformation, whether it can be used as a power to subjugate people as a military weapon. All of these things need to be understood in context of the benefits as well, and that cost benefit calculation is one that we spent a lot of time thinking about as well.
So, look, for Americans, AI is here. It’s in your computer every time you log on and you try to buy something. It increasingly will be used to help diagnose diseases, to help farmers better grow crops, to help educate kids. But we really want to make those benefits widely available to everybody. But we also need to understand, like some of these other challenges that I describe, the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, the Internet, it will have powerful impacts – in fact, disruptions – on how we do work in this country. There are people whose jobs currently exist that may not exist with more and more AI. And that recognition is something that really blends well, not only with the work I did at the United Nations, but really with my work as deputy secretary of labor. And these are the kinds of issues that we really try to start to flesh out in this resolution in the United Nations.
Ambassador (ret.) Christopher Lu was not formally trained as a diplomat, but his career working across the three branches of the U.S. government provided him with the experience needed to succeed as a senior figure in critical diplomatic negotiations. His time in public service as Deputy Secretary of Labor, White House Cabinet Secretary and Assistant to the President, as counsel for a Congressional committee, and other roles in government provided Amb. Lu with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed as a diplomat. Amb. Lu led the United Nations General Assembly’s first agreement on artificial intelligence (AI), as well as work on Global Digital Compact, which demonstrated U.S. leadership on emerging technology. His distinguished career provides lessons on how broad professional experiences can be utilized in the field of diplomacy.
Transcript
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Interviewer: You went from working as the Deputy Secretary for Labor in the Obama administration, among other important roles, to serving as Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations for Management and Reform. Can you explain how your career prior to serving at the UN informed the work you did in that role?
Amb. Lu: I’ve been blessed to have a 20-year career in the federal government. I’ve worked in all three branches. I’ve been in the House, the Senate, the White House. I’ve run a cabinet department. And I think the specialty that I have, to the extent that I had one, was managing complex organizations, driving change, overseeing budgets — and in some sense that was the job that I had at the U.S. Mission to the UN. The section that I oversaw was in charge of negotiating the UN budget. And so, we represent the U.S. during those negotiations. The U.S. is the largest financial contributor.
We were also in charge of overseeing the management of UN programs to make sure that they were delivering good services for the American people. And in a sense, that’s kind of the culmination of all the work I had done on the domestic level. I did have to learn foreign policy, I did have to learn the intricacies of the UN, but having spent so long in government before, I was very used to picking up new topic areas, and I was fortunately blessed with an amazing staff, incredible colleagues who were patient and helped me learn along the way.
Interviewer: While at the United Nations, you led the General Assembly resolution on artificial intelligence governance. How does one work with 120 different countries to reach consensus? What did that process look like?
Amb. Lu: So, while my day job was involved in leading U.S. budget negotiations, part of my portfolio was management and reform. The reform part of that portfolio is helping the United Nations address new challenges, new issues, and one of those issues is artificial intelligence. So, taking a step back even before the advent of ChatGPT in November of 2022, the Biden administration—under which I served—had been really thinking about what should be those norms, what should be the guardrails for artificial intelligence? And so back in 2022, the Biden administration put out a blueprint for AI Bill of Rights. Through 2023, the administration had worked with a lot of U.S. private sector tech companies on voluntary guidelines.
So, all of that culminated with an executive order in the Fall of 2023 about what responsible AI looks like. So, those were standards that were going to govern what we did here in the United States. But what’s important to understand about something like AI, both the opportunities and the challenges don’t stop at a nation’s borders. So, if you really truly wanted to put those guardrails — those norms — in place, you had to do them in an international setting and there’s no better setting than the United Nations. So, really over the course of six months in the fall of 2023 and in the early part of 2024, we worked intensively to take some of these basic concepts about transparency, about accountability, about ethics, human rights, sustainability, development, and incorporate them into a UN resolution.
I will say, even in the best of times trying to get 193 countries, which is the membership of the UN, to agree on anything is very, very difficult. And it was a laborious process; diplomacy, again, even in the best of times, is very hard, it takes time, it requires a lot of compromises. And what made this issue particularly challenging is that the development right now in the regulation of AI really involves a couple of handfuls of countries: It’s the Western countries, the United States, China, and some others. So, you were talking about an issue that mattered intensively to a small number of countries, but would ultimately affect every country in the world and trying in the end to get all of those countries on board with a resolution was a challenging feat. But in March of 2024, we reached consensus; all 193 countries agreed to it, and that really was a landmark accomplishment. For the first time, the United Nations issued a resolution on safe, secure, trustworthy artificial intelligence, and those would basically be the principles, the ground rules, for how the international community would look at artificial intelligence. And as importantly as other countries along the way started coming up with their own national governance and regulatory regimes, those words in the UN resolution would basically form the foundation of that. So, this was a landmark accomplishment. It’s something that I’m very proud of. And while I’m here taking credit for it, I had a phenomenal team of people in New York and Washington who really took the laboring oar on all of this.
Interviewer: The work you did on AI and the Global Digital Compact was cutting edge – addressing rapidly evolving issues that at times might seem inaccessible to the general public. What would you say to the American people about how this work advanced US interests?
Amb. Lu: Artificial intelligence really has the impact to transform our society in a way comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, the Computer Revolution of the mid-1900s, the advent of the Internet, but it will only do that if we do that in a responsible way. And so part of what we were trying to do is ensure that the applications of AI, whether it’s for improving health, alleviating poverty, improving education, helping people find jobs, skilling people for jobs – all of those benefits would flow equally, not just to the people, like in the United States who have the advantages of living in an industrialized country, but have the impact, have the ability to impact everyone around the world. The challenge is that there are significant inequalities in people’s access to technology. One third of the people in the world don’t have regular access to the Internet. So, if you don’t have access to the Internet, AI is far, far away. So, the goal really here was to make those benefits widely available, to help bridge some of these digital divides, build capacity in other countries so that they could also take advantage of them, while also recognizing some of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence; whether its ability to create misinformation, disinformation, whether it can be used as a power to subjugate people as a military weapon. All of these things need to be understood in context of the benefits as well, and that cost benefit calculation is one that we spent a lot of time thinking about as well.
So, look, for Americans, AI is here. It’s in your computer every time you log on and you try to buy something. It increasingly will be used to help diagnose diseases, to help farmers better grow crops, to help educate kids. But we really want to make those benefits widely available to everybody. But we also need to understand, like some of these other challenges that I describe, the Industrial Revolution, the Computer Revolution, the Internet, it will have powerful impacts – in fact, disruptions – on how we do work in this country. There are people whose jobs currently exist that may not exist with more and more AI. And that recognition is something that really blends well, not only with the work I did at the United Nations, but really with my work as deputy secretary of labor. And these are the kinds of issues that we really try to start to flesh out in this resolution in the United Nations.
