Open @ UNGA 81: Open Hardware

Tahir Amin discusses his new book on how to change the pharmaceutical industry for the better.Tahir Amin and Rohit Malpani, two leading figures in the access to medicines movement, examine the origins of this system of rules that champions monopolies and innovation over the public interest and human well-being. They tell the story of how, move by move, governments have ceded control to and then empowered pharmaceutical companies, making it increasingly hard to undo the damage wreaked along the way. From their unique vantage points and experiences, the authors critique global health initiatives and philanthropists for maintaining the status quo and warn of a future dominated by financial markets and artificial intelligence that will reinforce the worst practices of yesterday and portends new injustices for everyone.

Access to affordable medicine is a human right. Yet across the United States, drug prices remain out of reach for millions, with the heaviest burdens falling on Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other communities long excluded from equitable care. At the same time, a profit-driven pharmaceutical system drains public resources and puts enormous pressure on the health systems communities depend on.Public pharma offers a different path. This panel will explore three urgent questions:Why is the current system failing us? Market failures, perverse incentives, and extractive private actors throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain – from research and development to manufacturing to distribution – keep life-saving medicines unaffordable for the people who need them most.What can public pharma actually do? Public options at every stage of the pharmaceutical value chain can create real competition, check private power, and deliver on government’s fundamental responsibility to ensure people can access the medicines they need.Where is this happening right now? Public pharma initiatives are gaining momentum across the country. Our panelists will share what is working, what we are learning, and how these efforts are building toward lasting systemic change.

During July’s UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, Secretary-General Guterres mentioned not letting “the digital divide harden into an AI divide.” This panel will explore the space between “open everything” and “close everything,” asking what meaningful access, governance, and participation require in practice. AI has changed the scale and stakes of data reuse. Material can now be ingested, combined, and commercialized far beyond its original context, prompting some communities and rightsholders to reconsider open access. But broad retrenchment carries its own costs. This includes a shrinking commons, disadvantaged researchers, and data access limited to those who can negotiate private deals. This panel explores the space between “open everything” and “close everything” and what meaningful access, governance, and participation require.

Open source has repeatedly reshaped technology markets by lowering barriers to entry, reducing rent extraction, and enabling innovation beyond what proprietary licensing allows. But open source code alone doesn’t guarantee competition, “sovereingnty,” or decentralization. A project can also be open while the surrounding market remains concentrated in cloud, compute, distribution, data, or complementary services, having little ultimate impact on the incentives of the actors in the market or the competitive dynamics. These tensions are especially visible in AI, where “open weights” are often treated as synonymous with open source even when other ingredients needed to study, reproduce, or operate the system remain unavailable. This panel examines open source as a market-shaping tool, asking what complementary conditions (architecture, protocols, procurement, governance) make it effective, and what outcomes are actually feasible in AI markets.

As AI grows, so does dependence on the companies and institutions that control the infrastructure on which it runs. “Public” infrastructure can mean government-built systems or open, cross-border infrastructure maintained by nonprofit, research, commercial, or volunteer communities. This panel will discuss how these models intersect with sovereignty, drawing on analogies like natural food webs to examine when openness and shared standards genuinely reduce lock-in, what dependencies persist across cloud, compute, and skills, and how public institutions can fund infrastructure that’s adaptable and accountable without every country rebuilding from scratch.

Open hardware can help make AI systems more inspectable, adaptable, repairable, and interoperable. This lightning talk situates open hardware as one layer of a broader sovereignty strategy: a tool for expanding technical choice and auditability, not a promise that every country or community can manufacture or operate an entire computing stack on its own. It clarifies what open hardware can realistically deliver, including greater technical choice, auditability, and resistance to vendor lock-in, and where its limits lie against the reality of concentrated chip and cloud supply chains.

Digital sovereignty in the AI era cannot be realized through isolation or full-stack self-sufficiency. The cost of compute, hardware, and sovereign AI architectures makes it structurally impossible to own and control every layer of the stack independently. True digital agency instead comes through strategic partnership: shared open-source architectures, joint compute models, and standardized data protocols.This session brings together leaders to explore how middle powers can collaborate to avoid vendor lock-in and build a resilient, open tech stack, from scaling shared protocols like X-Road and MOSIP to pooled financing that mutualizes infrastructure costs. The panel will also weigh which multilateral forum (UN, G20, or G7) is best positioned to host ongoing technical governance and collaborative infrastructure development.

This episode features audio from the book event Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry. It features a discussion with the book's authors J.S. Tan and Clarissa Redwine, moderated by Nikhil Singh.

In response to rising HIV cases in New York City, PrEP4All and the Save HIV Funding Campaign will convene a Community Forum in partnership with NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. Once a national leader in ending the HIV epidemic, New York now faces stalled progress and increasing diagnoses — particularly in communities long disproportionately impacted — making this a critical moment for renewed urgency and leadership. This Town Hall will bring together candidates for New York’s 12th Congressional District, alongside public health leaders and advocates, for a solutions-driven conversation on expanding PrEP access and strengthening prevention infrastructure. Designed as a high-visibility platform, the forum aims to drive concrete policy commitments and public accountability at a pivotal moment for HIV prevention. Candidates in attendance will include, Alex Bores Chris Diep Laura Dunn Dr. Wilneida Negron Karen Ortiz Nina Schwalbe Patrick Timmins Note: The event will be conducted in a strictly nonpartisan manner, with no endorsement of candidates or political parties

This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event, featuring a presentation by Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure. It was recorded on April 8, 2026.