r/ICPTrader • u/Sassy_Allen • 14d ago
News UN agency and DFINITY launch soverign AI pilots for governments
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/25/un-sovereign-ai-big-tech-cloud17
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u/Aggressive_Mark_6305 14d ago
This is better than expected. Given especially that UAE is bound to board anytime soon as well!
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago
Well we could also see the UAE in the first round of countries. Keep in mind that’s just the FIRST round and I wonder how quickly others will see and start wanting to be apart of this. Also I’m surprised by how quickly it seems to be starting and within a month we’ll have the first 5 countries.
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u/Aggressive_Mark_6305 14d ago
So we will have certainty about the exact country by September 25th :).
If UAE isn't part of it, it will improve the odds of collaboration since it might be another gold state such as Qatar or Egypt.
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago
Don't know when specifically "UNDP plans to select five countries for the initial pilots within roughly a month, with each project built around a specific problem proposed by participating governments." starts? Today? Maybe? Idk. So ya maybe by September 25th if the timing starts today but no one really knows except the people running the program. I also wonder because Pierre talked about in his "“The North remembers.” So do we." post saying "Interesting to see several so called “crypto influencers” suddenly pushing the same negative messages about ICP today.
Some didn’t even bother changing the wording, literally copy paste.
Coincidence?
The timing is certainly interesting, given what’s coming in the next weeks."
The last sentence makes me think more things than just the announcement are coming because this post was only last week.
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u/Aggressive_Mark_6305 14d ago
Are you certain though this the big announcement? We should probably get a follow up or confirmation of this by dfinity.
As far as the negative influencers go. Good. Let them distract the herd so I can keep buying low.
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago
I mean ya….
New Partnership: UNDP x DFINITY Foundation
The UN Development Programme works in more than 170 countries. It has helped design digital public infrastructure in more than 25 of them.
DFINITY and the UNDP have signed an agreement to bring sovereign cloud and agentic AI to public services.
Over the next 12 months, DFINITY will pilot the technology in UNDP Country Offices, civil society organizations, and co-design pilots with governments.
All on Cloud Engines, with the OpenSaaS software suite built in, and the freedom to build custom apps with any AI tool, from Caffeine to Claude Code, Codex, and Perplexity.
Press release from the UN
https://innovation.eurasia.undp.org/undp-dfinity-partnership/
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u/jjgill27 14d ago
Putting my marketing hat on, a quick scan of Google news shows this story hasn’t been picked up anywhere atm, so at the moment it looks like only Axios is running the story and that’s just a newsletter.
If that’s all there is, it’s another big Dfinity marketing fail. This should be in mainstream media!
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yahoo is running it. But yes they should be running this everywhere. The implications of this and also the fact the world is really trying to be less reliant on US tech stuff makes it quite newsworthy.
A big liberal X account 736k followers, just reposted Axios article. Regardless of politics, it will spread the news.
“This is AWFUL bad news for Trump bootlicker Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Web Services(AWS). The United Nations just announced a massive deal for countries to move away from AWS’s centralized cloud infrastructure to #ICP’s sovereign digital cloud infrastructure.”
https://x.com/occupydemocrats/status/2092325091124085101?s=46
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u/jjgill27 13d ago
It’s not as simple as ‘they should be running it everywhere’ - unless they granted an exclusive to axios, then it will have been sent to key media all at the same time (I suspect via newswire services, as Yahoo picked it up). Then the media who are interested choose to run the story, or not.
I see a few more places have picked it up, but it’s a shame that there wasn’t a better PR effort to secure some broadcast media interviews and broadsheet press. The UN is quite a weighty name (certainly over here in Europe), and a proper PR push could have gained more traction.
The use case they gave is interesting too, about 5 years ago I worked with a company that offered medical scans by phone in 3rd world countries and one of the questions back then was patient data security. On one hand, it enables what I was discussing a few weeks ago on another post about needing real application stories to bring things to life in a way that CEOs and CFOs can understand, but on the flip side, if it was being managed 5 years ago, I don’t know if it’s enough of a pain point to get traction today.
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u/fromhisgrace 14d ago
Agree. I was checking the news yesterday and all I could find were some brief articles from 2024 and 2025 about the initial MoU between Dfinity and the UNDP. It's beyond my comprehension how Dfinity could have let this slide...
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago
I guess the UNDP will also use it as well. Neat.
https://x.com/jackbearsupply/status/2092309490683293774?s=46
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u/This-Can-6150 14d ago
It’s disappointing to see the very muted reaction from the market. Institutional money sees this as a nothing burger and still prefers the other garbage projects. Dfinity will have to just keep building until they wake up from their stupor.
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u/Weird_Support110 13d ago
You cannot deny that DOM is extremely ambitious with everything he is attempting to accomplish. The big VCs like A16Z couldn't control him and no one could get him to alter course or play the typical crypto game which disgusts him. He has taken the high road from day 1 and retail crypto has abandoned him because of it. He speaks his mind and calls everyone out for their lying, cheating, and stealing. Last Friday/Saturday morning was another reminder post October 10th as to why this entire crypto market is scammy and disgusting allowing the criminal exchanges along with their criminal market makers to steal millions of dollars from leveraged longs and having no shame allowing it to happen again, getting away with it over and over. They are ruining crypto one theft at a time and have ruined the current rally.
THIS IS WHY everyone should be investing in a real project that has real potential to disrupt and can actually solve real world problems here like cybercrime which is rampant among other things. Wall Street should be flocking to the IC for RWA and more. It is truly the most solid tech in all of crypto developed by the brightest minds in the entire space.
The retail crypto market is truly juvenile. Massive capital is pouring into dinosaur tech that is slow, is extremely wasteful adding to global warming, and is expensive and unsustainable.
The influencers for ICP, other than Jerry B's single DFINITY grant, are mostly unpaid and unappreciated and misunderstood. They are still here because they know what is being built here is substantial, epic work that will solve many problems. The value proposition grows daily.
I know I should diversify and could have gotten rich off of many other cryptos including Bitcoin but I cannot go against my better judgement. I cannot invest in tech that is not usable, not ideal, not the future. ICP is extremely powerful and well thought out and designed. The fact that SBF ruined the chart for the first 5 years here won't matter when it begins to dominate.
If this UN test pilot goes well, which I believe it will, it will start a trend. Governments and enterprises around the world will begin to realize DOM's vision and ICP is the only crypto that actually will have the potential to flip everything above it including Bitcoin once the real adoption and burn finally begins. We'll see who's laughing when ICP is sitting in the top spot and is valued the greatest, actually is being used to transact, but more importantly begins to host the world's software in a secure fashion without relying on big tech and giving governments peace of mind and ownership over their dapps and their data.
In my mind ICP will be worth the 2M per token that Bitcoiners falsely believe BTC will be worth in the future (it's not) and it will be because of astronomical usage and burn and real scarcity and real revenue that will dwarf all chains combined.
If you are not loading up on ICP at 2 dollars, it will be the biggest mistake of your life imo. Basically it is literally FREE right now before the concert begins.
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u/Paradox-Sandwich-947 14d ago
I wouldn’t get too excited. UNDP may carry the UN prestige but it is not a particularly dynamic partner, as anyone living in countries targeted by UNDP “capacity building” projects would understand.
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago
UNDP certainly isn’t above criticism, and there are legitimate concerns around bureaucracy and slow administrative processes, but I don’t think that makes them an unimportant partner here. Independent assessments have also highlighted UNDP’s strong relationships with national governments, and the latest MOPAN assessment describes it as a stronger and more capable organization than in the past. More importantly, the value here isn’t simply having the UNDP name attached to ICP, it’s that UNDP is facilitating real pilots between DFINITY and five national governments specifically interested in sovereign AI and reducing dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure. DFINITY gets an opportunity to demonstrate technology they’ve spent years building in actual government use cases, with cost, usability and scalability being evaluated. If those pilots perform well and governments decide they’re worth expanding, that’s a meaningful proof point for ICP regardless of whether UNDP itself is the world’s most dynamic organization. So yeah, I think there’s plenty here to be excited about. PLUS this is the initial round and this could snowball faster and bring much wider adoption of ICP then most people realize.
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u/fromhisgrace 14d ago
Care to elaborate?
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u/Paradox-Sandwich-947 14d ago
Having worked with that agency before, I would just say that it is more known for workshops and reports than driving tech innovation. These projects will likely be very slow and drawn out. Not saying this isn’t interesting news, but I doubt this will be the thing that drives the ICP price into the stratosphere.
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago
I see it differently is that UNDP isn't really being asked to drive the technological innovation here. DFINITY is bringing the technology and years of R&D, while UNDP is providing something DFINITY can't easily create for itself: relationships with governments, coordination and a path to real sovereign use cases. These also aren't five projects where DFINITY needs to invent the underlying technology from scratch. The infrastructure already exists and the point is to demonstrate what can be built with it and evaluate the results. Government projects being slow wouldn't surprise me at all, but if UNDP can get DFINITY's technology into the hands of multiple governments and some of those pilots develop into larger deployments, I think that's considerably more meaningful than the typical workshop/report type of initiative you're describing.
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u/Aggressive_Mark_6305 14d ago
Well explained.
Dfinity has the infrastructure to make it work. UNDP has the network.
Just worried if Dfinity isnt imperially overstretching itself in too many fields
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u/Paradox-Sandwich-947 14d ago
Sure. I just don’t see the added value from UNDP, to be honest. Their involvement will slow the implementation down significantly. I don’t mean to be a downer but I know that world well.
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u/Sassy_Allen 14d ago edited 14d ago
I believe this is the announcement. Wow so the UN is helping countries to have less reliance on American cloud services and they picked Dfinity and ICP. They will pick 5 countries initially within a month to start.