Acknowledgement  ii

Executive summary  2

Introduction  6

The global realities of AI adoption and diffusion in practice  8

Why small states and other resource-constrained contexts matter for global trust in AI  10

Key observations summary on AI adoption in practice from small states  12

AI adoption is outpacing institutional visibility and governance readiness  12

Vendor-driven adoption raises dependency concerns and limits control  13

Limited in-country technical evaluation and protection capacity  14

Infrastructure and system readiness are often misaligned with AI deployment  14

Harms are amplified and remediation is constrained  15

Trust and safety priorities shift towards prevention and decision confidence  16

What this foreshadows about AI adoption in practice globally  17

Governance and institutional infrastructure for scaling safe and trusted AI adoption in resource-constrained environments  20

Digital public infrastructure and data systems as AI capacity enablers  21

Horizontal foundations for AI governance in practice across the AI Trust & Safety Re-imagination Programme  22

A shared actionable approach for AI adoption in practice  24

Jointly building capacity and resilience  26

Collective action and iterative scaling  27

What this moment requires  28

AI Trust & Safety Re-imagination Programme  31

Methodology  32