The United Nations on Thursday announced that it is working with Google to make its large collection of global statistics easier for AI systems to access and use.
Called the UN System Data Commons, the new system is built on Google’s open source Data Commons platform and lets people search for statistics from across UN agencies using natural-language queries. The new platform also supports the Model Context Protocol, a standard that allows AI systems to connect directly to external data sources.
Users turn to AI tools for answers, but many systems still struggle to surface authoritative data. A UNICEF benchmark of six large language models across more than 133,000 responses to questions about global development indicators produced an average accuracy score of just 21.2%, João Pedro Azevedo, the agency’s chief statistician, told reporters in a virtual briefing.
The test covered OpenAI’s GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Azevedo told TechCrunch.
About three in five responses did not provide an usable number at all, often because the models hedged their answers, Azevedo said.
Visits from users clicking links in ChatGPT answers to the site rose 67% year-over-year between January 1 and September 14, Azevedo told TechCrunch.
The UN said 26 of its entities have committed to the Data Commons, with data from nearly 20 available at launch.
Google launched Data Commons in 2018 as an effort to organize public datasets from different sources into a common framework.