We need a GATT 2.0 ...

The WTO's World Trade Report 2025 (wtr25) is the most rigorous institutional analysis of AI and trade ever published by a multilateral body.

It correctly identifies data quality as the binding constraint on AI value.

It correctly frames this as a moment of strategic choice.

And it arrives, as every previous iteration of international AI-trade governance has arrived, at the same gap: the layer below the policy level, where trade data is actually structured, submitted, and consumed by risk engines.

That gap has a name. The Relationship Gap. And it has an answer.

Today the Global Customs & Trade Forum publishes GATT 2.0: A Governance Architecture for the Era of Data-Driven Trade — a paper that takes WTR25's findings at full intellectual weight and extends them to the data architecture layer the WTO's instruments do not reach.

The argument in one paragraph: AI in customs is bounded not by model sophistication but by the quality of the data those models consume. That data is structurally broken at the transaction boundary — commercial invoices, packing lists, and certificates of origin do not reference each other's identifiers in machine-readable form.

The connection between document, physical unit, and regulatory credential exists in the mind of the customs broker, not in a field an AI risk engine can consume. No model fixes that. A specification does. The Trade Line Assertion is that specification.

The paper builds on WTR25. It names what WTR25 could not name. It offers the architecture as public infrastructure — open-standards, CC BY 4.0, institutionally unencumbered — to the researchers, officials, and program designers best placed to take it further.

GATT 1947 was the governance response to the barrier of its era. GATT 2.0 is proposed as the governance response to the barrier of this one.

The General Agreement on Trade Technology - GATT 2.0, and the new ways of governance are needed to complete the graph first inversion to move from document-centric processes to data-centric processes.

The smart people in the room can take it from here.

WTO World Trade Report 2025: https://lnkd.in/dHvrgamx