Policy Brief No. 230 — March 2026
The Fourth Path: Middle-Income Countries and Prosocial AI Cornelia C. Walther
Key Points → Middle-income countries, home to 75 percent of the global population, have an opportunity to pioneer a prosocial approach to regulating artificial intelligence (AI). → Prosocial AI — systems tailored, trained, tested and targeted to advance human well-being and planetary health — offers a framework for these countries to take a fourth path to AI policy that avoids the pitfalls of the three current models and aligns technological development with sustainable and equitable outcomes, embedding these values from the design phase onward. → This fourth path demands regional cooperation among middle-income countries to share information on AI policy experiments and their outcomes; build collective capacity; and demonstrate that prosocial innovation can drive both economic competitiveness and human development.
The Challenge The global conversation about humanity’s technological future oscillates between familiar poles: Silicon Valley’s market-driven techno-optimism, Brussels’ comprehensive regulatory frameworks and Beijing’s state-directed technological governance. Yet none of these three paths adequately serves the 6.5 billion people living outside these paradigms. The future will be forged in New Delhi, Brasília, Jakarta and Nairobi — across the Global South where three-quarters of the world’s population lives. Middle-income countries occupy a unique position. They are neither trapped in extreme poverty nor locked into the legacy systems of wealthy nations. This positioning makes them particularly capable of pioneering a fourth path that is genuinely prosocial — pro-people, pro-planet and focused on developing human potential. These 108 nations, as defined by the World Bank’s middle-income country classification (including both lower- and upper-middle-income groups), are home to roughly 75 percent of the global population and produce