Dredd Blog: Will The UN Relocate? If So To Where?

Saturday, March 14, 2026

United?

I asked and my AI source responded:

The UN headquarters was located in New York City in 1946 after a last-minute $8.5 million donation from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was accepted to purchase a 17-acre waterfront slaughterhouse site in Manhattan's Turtle Bay. The choice followed competition among U.S. cities, with key lobbying by Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Key details regarding the establishment:

• Initial Temporary Locations: Before the permanent site was built, the UN held sessions at Hunter College (now Lehman College) in the Bronx and used the Sperry Gyroscope factory in Lake Success, NY. The General Assembly met at the New York City Building in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens.
• The Site Deal: John D. Rockefeller Jr. offered to buy the site, and the city provided additional property to seal the deal in December 1946.
• Construction: Groundbreaking occurred in 1948, with the first 450 employees starting work in the Secretariat Building on August 22, 1950. The headquarters were completed in 1952.
• Financing: The United States government provided an interest-free loan of $65 million for construction.
• Extraterritoriality: Although situated in NYC, the land is under the sole administration of the UN, operating as an international zone rather than U.S. territory. [3, 5, 6, 7, 8]

AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headquarters_of_the_United_Nations
[2] https://passblue.com/2013/07/18/why-the-un-was-built-in-new-york-and-not-in-south-dakota/
[3] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/english_2019.pdf
[4] https://www.facebook.com/UNVisitorsCentre/posts/the-united-nations-headquarters-is-located-on-an-international-zone-governed-by-/1422777266561466/
[5] https://www.facebook.com/UNVisitorsCentre/posts/united-nations-headquarters-occupy-18-acres-of-land-in-midtown-manhattan-and-ove/1245497344289460/
[6] https://www.un.org/ungifts/united-nations-ny-site
[7] https://unitedcareercoalition.org/questions-and-answers-about-united-nations-blog/un-locations-usa-nyc
[8] https://www.facebook.com/UNGeneva/posts/flashbackfridayon-9-january-1951-the-united-nations-headquarters-officially-open/1004589111704392/

I also asked the same source "Who Owns AI?" to which AI responded:

No single person or company owns "AI" as a whole; it is a field of technology comprised of algorithms, infrastructure, and data owned by

Corporate Ownership of Major AI Labs

Major AI models are owned by a small group of "Big Tech" companies and specialized labs: [6, 7]

OpenAI: This operates as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). Microsoft is its largest investor with a 27% stake. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26%, and employees/investors own the remaining 47%.
Anthropic: The creator of Claude is a Public Benefit Corporation founded by former OpenAI executives. Amazon and Google are major backers.
xAI: This company, founded by Elon Musk, became a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX in early 2026.
Google & Meta: These companies develop and own proprietary models like Gemini and Llama internally. [2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]

AI requires massive computing power to function. This "backbone" is dominated by: [15]

Nvidia: This is the primary manufacturer of the GPUs used to train almost all modern AI.
Cloud Providers: Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), and Google Cloud own the physical data centers where AI resides. [2, 6, 16, 17]

The ownership of what an AI creates is still a major legal debate: [18]

Human-Centric Laws: In the U.S. and many other regions, the U.S. Copyright Office generally maintains that works must be created by humans to be copyrighted.
Corporate Policy: Most AI companies (like OpenAI) include terms of service that grant the user ownership of the outputs, though these rights may not be legally enforceable in copyright court.
Data Rights: Lawsuits from authors and artists argue that because AI is trained on their work, they should have a stake in its ownership. [18, 19, 20, 21, 22]