This brief includes the following topics:
This House would require social media platforms and search engines to pay news publishers for the content they share by Dithyae Devesh
This House believes that environmentally sensitive regions should prioritize preservation over ecotourism by Aditi Singh
This House believes that open-source development should be prioritized over proprietary innovation by Sophia Li
This House, as the United Nations, would abolish permanent membership on the Security Council by Emily Hu
This House would require social media platforms and search engines to pay news publishers for the content they share.
Before I define the terms and break down the motion, here is some necessary context to help you understand why we are having this debate.
Context
Currently, this policy has a real track record. Therefore all the data below can be useful for both sides. Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code came into force in March 2021 after the competition regulator found a bargaining power imbalance between news outlets and digital platforms. During the original conflict, Facebook blocked news in Australia. The code then produced payments of almost AU$250m annually from Meta and Google to Australian news businesses. In 2024 Meta announced it would no longer renew funding deals with publishers, and the government has spent its time trying to close that gap.
That effort has produced a new model. In August 2026, Australia passed the News Bargaining Incentive, which requires large social media and search companies to either sign funding deals with Australian news businesses or pay a 2.5% charge on their Australian digital advertising revenue. The government claimed their intention was to fix a loophole that let a platform withdraw news from its services and escape its obligations under the code. This model is the most up-to-date, making it easy for Prop to learn on it directly.
On the other hand, Canada took a different approach. Its Online News Act passed in June 2023, and Meta blocked news links on Facebook and Instagram from August of that year. Google threatened to do the same, but they instead reached a general consensus where they agreed to pay C$100m annually into a fund that would be distributed to publishers. The government estimated Google would owe about C$172m. The gap between these two numbers is just proof that the numbers will always be contested, but there is a general category in which they fall. Meta, meanwhile, has avoided any payments by blocking Canadian news on its platforms.
The two scenarios give Prop and Opp one example each. Australia is Prop’s best evidence that a mandate can raise real money. Canada is Opp’s best evidence that platforms would rather remove news sources than pay. It is vital that both teams know information of both examples because the strangest rounds will clash them well: Prop arguing that Australia’s new design fixes the Canadian problem and Opp arguing that Canada shows what happens when one platform simply leaves.
Definitions
Let’s break the motion down into four phrases:
Require: a legal mandate backed by a penalty. Both sides need to ensure some modicum of repercussions. A mandate can take several forms whether its a forced bargaining process—like Australia and Canada, or a flat tax-like charge on platform revenue.
Pay: I recommend Prop defines this as payment to news publishers, whether directly or through a collective fund that distributes the money. Prop should also say that the amount and the rules for who qualifies are set by law. The motion only needs to establish the principle of mandatory payment.
News publishers: outlets that produce journalism. If it is not defined, it is easy for Opp to argue that blogs and content farms can also claim payment.
Content they share: is vague and should be clarified. I recommend defining it as news content that appears on or is surfaced through the platform. But, it could mean a link, a headline, or a snippet. Use its scope to help your side.
Framing
Both teams should view this debate like a legal mandate, because real-world versions of it already exist. Prop should be looking to defend this principle of mandatory payment and can pick any model to defend as their mechanisms. Opp should defend either no mandate at all or a different way of supporting journalism, like public subsidies or voluntary deals. Opp needs to be very careful with what characterization they choose because a world with no support for news is hard to defend, and a world with public subsidy invites a “why not both” response from Prop.
Prop
First argument: the platforms profit from news without paying for it; a mandate corrects that imbalance
This is the most intuitive and simple argument for Prop. News organizations spend money to report, verify, and public stories. Platforms then use that work to attract users and sell advertising against it. The Australian regulator’s finding of a bargaining imbalance is only the starting point. But, it does show that a government investigation concluded how the market wasn’t working. The core of the argument is that a free negotiation platform can simply walk away, while publishers cannot walk away from where their audience is. A legal requirement is the only thing that makes that bargaining real.
As a mechanism, you can explain why voluntary deals fail. A platform has no incentive to pay if it can credibly threaten to remove news, so only a law that makes payment unavoidable changes the outcome. This is where the Australian design is useful. A charge on revenue that applies unless the platform signs deals means that withdrawing news no longer lets it escape the cost. This directly answers the “sources will just leave” response Opp will probably run. When weighing, you should argue that fairness to the people who actually produce the content is a principled concept and Opp needs to justify why the most profitable companies in the world should keep a free input.
Second argument: journalism is a public good that the market underfunds, and payment is how a healthy democracy can keep it alive
This argument focuses more on consequences. Local and investigative journalism holds governments and companies accountable, while benefiting everyone—even those who never pay for it. The advertising revenue that once funded newsrooms has moved to platforms, so the same companies that captured the revenue are now the ones that benefit from the information ecosystem that journalism creates. Requiring them to pay ensures that part of that money goes to the people doing the work.
I think it is important to ground this argument in what the money is actually doing. In Australia, some outlets testified that the deals created additional journalist roles and expanded their coverage, and the 2024 job cuts followed Meta’s decision not to renew. Prop can use that sequence to argue that the funding is the difference between newsrooms existing and not existing. The stakeholders are the citizens in places with no other local coverage. It might be useful to have a comparative on democratic health. A world where platforms are the main route to news and contribute nothing to its production is one where the supply of reliable information shrinks while the supply of everything else grows.
Opposition
First argument: platforms will remove news rather than pay, and people who lose publishers are citizens
This is Opp’s strongest argument, and Canada is the evidence. After Meta’s ban, Canadian news outlets lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram, and the loss was not made up on other platforms, leaving an overall 43% drop in engagement. The same research found that about 30% of local news outlets that had been active on social media were now inactive and Canadians were seeing an estimated 11 million fewer news views per day. Meta, on the other hand, was seemingly unaffected by this mandate. It hurt the very people it was meant to help, while the target barely noticed.
It can be helpful to build this around the idea that the platform controls the existence and the law cannot force it to stay. Prop will point to the Australian charge as a fix, so Opp needs to push back in two ways. First, the Australian design is new and untested, and Cadana is the only real evidence of what a platform does when faced with a mandate. Second, even a charge pushes platforms to reduce new prominence in other ways, like down-ranking it or canceling news-specific products, like Meta did when they announced to stop entering new deals for traditional news content. The strongest framing here would be that news publishers are the weaker party in this relationship, so a policy that gives the stronger party a reason to leave is a bad bet. The vulnerable local outlets have the most to lose, because they depend most on social distribution.
Second argument: the money will go to the wrong places, and the principle behind it is flawed
This argument operates on a principle and practical level. On the practical, the benefits tend to concentrate in large organizations. In Australia, some independent publishers complained they received no funding under the code, and that financial benefits flowed to large media conglomerates. That is a serious issue for Prop’s public good argument, since journalism that needs the most support ends up being at the smallest outlets. Some researchers stay that large companies are favored but Opp should expect to be challenged on this and needs to use independent publisher companies rather than just asserting the claim as evidence.
On a principle level, Opp can argue that platforms already deliver value to publishers by sending them readers. Google maintains that its news links were worth about C$250m annually to Canadian publishers. That figure is Google’s own claim, so it operates more like an argument rather than a fact. The point here is essentially saying that paying for links changes how the open web works because links have always been free. Opp can also argue that money from a mandate makes publishers dependent on a payment that the government controls and can be ripped away at any moment. That dependence is a risk to independence that makes journalism valuable in the first place.
For Opp’s comparative, you can argue that better alternatives exist. Look into direct public funding for local journalism, or targeted support for small outlets. These avoid any platform problems and will push Prop to explain why a mandate is better than a word with no mandate and a more intentional or careful subsidy.
Further Readings
Mediaweek: News Bargaining Incentive makes ground in Parliament: 'Win for journalism' | Mediaweek
CBC report: Google sends $100M in funds to journalism collective in exchange for Online News Act exemption
Press Gazette: Google agrees $100m deal with Canadian publishers ahead of Online News Act - Press Gazette
Media Ecosystem Observatory report: Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta's News Ban in Canada | CMTD
Press Gazette: Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta's News Ban in Canada | CMTD
Al Jazeera report: Meta says it will stop funding news in Australia, prompting backlash
Dithyae Devesh is a sophomore at Cornell University studying Public Policy and Economics. She competed for The Hockaday School and was on Team Texas for the 24-25 season. Outside of school she loves dancing, going to concerts, and exploring new places with her friends.
This House believes that environmentally sensitive regions should prioritize preservation over ecotourism.
Context
As the global ecotourism market expands and concerns about climate change mount, the debate over the best mechanisms to protect the planet is an urgent one. Environmentally sensitive regions, such as coral reefs, rainforests and island ecosystems, are often located in the global south where economic needs may compete with conservation efforts. Two broad models for addressing these concerns have emerged: preservation, which generally excludes commercial activity, and ecotourism, which relies on nature-based tourism to generate revenue. In a global context where traditional preservation methods are often viewed as insufficient and ecotourism ideals are criticized as extractivist, this debate asks which model should be prioritized.
Framing
With environmental motions, the debate crystallizes around a quality vs urgency debate–specifically, is it better to have ‘pure’ environmental protectionism with potentially less support and slower mechanization, or is a more urgent but capitalistically-tainted solution comparably viable?
Characterizations need to include what ecotourism/preservation look like in the status quo and where each of these strategies are most prevalent, and the framework non-negotiably must clearly identify the distinction between the two (for example, incentives of involved actors). Because both sides of the debate argue that their model generates some version of environmental protection, clearly returning to the established distinction in every speech will mitigate issues with improper worldbuilding. Moreover, the majority of climate debates funnel into time frame debates (ie climate change is a long-term process but a short term issue), so the distinction you identify between both models in the framing needs to clearly set you up for this weighing later in the debate.
Include context in these characterizations–where are environmentally sensitive regions located? What social and political factors have resulted in this environmental sensitivity? How would ‘prioritization’ be practically mechanized? For example, on the opposition, characterizing the role of declining capital in waning preservation efforts in the status quo in framing might set you up well for defensive work in the O1.
Because this is a “believes” motion, you are defending these concepts as they currently exist, not as you would like them to be. As such, it is worthwhile to accumulate a wide variety of examples of preservation and ecotourism to understand the breadth of what these projects may look like and more robustly weigh impacts in the debate. Ideally, by pulling pieces of existing preservation/ecotourism work, you can properly develop your side’s offense, as it is easy for this debate to become defensive. However, ensure that as you use these examples, you are repeatedly demonstrating why the mechanisms used in them are likely to be applicable to a broader global context.
Prop
On the proposition, winning the urgency of action argument is unlikely– it is fairly easy for the opposition to demonstrate that creating an economic exigence for environmentalism drives more immediate action. Thus, proposition must reframe the debate to demonstrate why slower-moving activism with greater quality and probability of success is a preferable narrative. Because of this, from the very first speech, you need to cast immense doubt upon the effectiveness of ecotourism in environmental progress; most importantly, you need to ground these issues in the debate. By establishing early on that the issues with functionality of ecotourism are rooted in the same capitalistic incentives that opposition propones, you make the issues with your examples more generalizable, and the probability debate favors your side. The two major arguments of the debate focus on the relative quality of environmental protection gained under preservation compared to ecotourism.
First, preservation maintains core ecological function to the greatest degree possible. While commodification shapes what aspects are protected based on which of its facets are most marketable, preservation is squarely focused upon the things that matter most: maintaining ecological networks (like food networks), conserving particular domains of environmental life (like coral reefs), and establishment of legal boundaries to pre-empt future damage. When side opposition gains access to a large swath of land on the coastline, they might focus on cleaning up the beach to ensure marketability, but they leave behind the dying reefs further from the shore. By establishing the macroethic of the opposition as fundamentally antithetical to meaningful environmentalism, you can establish a ‘mini-burden’ for the opposition: in order to prove that ecotourism has comparative environmental impact, they need to prove that profit-driven companies have an incentive to do the less glamorous, more impactful environmental work. The goal here is to move away from the urgency debate. Now, even if you are not winning the probability of immediate action, you win the probability of meaningful action. This is the distinction to be made in the debate; climate change is absolutely a time frame issue, but performative cleanups to improve aesthetic value for tourists will never be more meaningful than evidence-based practice, even if the cleanups happen earlier on.
Second, preservation is inherently less reliant on climate-damaging infrastructure and thus has the smallest probability of placing additional stress on the climate system. Ecotourism necessitates, at a bare minimum, visitor centers and travel. Assuming this ecotourism is successful, companies will expand this infrastructure over time, incurring environmental damage that is not addressed with urgency due to diluted accountability and lack of profit incentive. By offloading the responsibility of environmental damages to the tourists, companies evade accountability, and unless the damage is immediately aesthetically damaging, profit-driven companies have no reason to properly address the issue. Here, you are demonstrating that ecotourism is not only less likely to meaningfully protect the environment but is also more likely to actively damage it. This argument is similarly a probability issue; in a worst case prop world, preservation is ineffective, but in a worst case opp world, ecotourism worsens the problem that the debate is meant to correct. Given an opposition argument regarding the time frame urgency of climate change, this sets you up for some nice metaweighing. If we acknowledge that the climate is actively at a tipping point, the time frame of potential progress is less relevant than the probability of potential damage that could push us over the edge. Essentially, this method of weighing gives you room to center the debate around damage probability rather than immediacy.
Opp
The incentive debate works very well for the opposition, but this also necessitates contention with the ethical concerns surrounding profit-driven environmentalism. The two major arguments here focus on political support and capital support for the environmentalism movement.
First, creating an economic exigence for environmentalism drives political support. In order to properly set up this argument, you need to do the work of demonstrating that support for a political issue matters independently of reasons for supporting the given issue.* Politicians are primarily motivated by extending the duration of their power, and by extension, they care about 1) money from lobbying and 2) voter support. While traditional environmentalist organizations focused on preservation lack the funds to extensively lobby, a profitable ecotourist organization has both the incentive and funding to lobby for environment-friendly policy. Moreover, voter support is contingent upon the production of results within the time frame of a politician’s tenure–the likelihood of an ecotourism company turning a profit in a few years is more likely than robust environmental recovery via protectionism in the same time. As such, an ecotourist approach makes sustained public support for pro-environment legislation more likely; even voters who do not feel strongly about environmentalism may be willing to support local economies. For this argument to be successful, you need to properly demonstrate why political power and legislative change are necessary for environmental progress and why the preservation movement struggles in this area.
Second, ecotourism results in more capital investment in environmental protectionism. As such, the strategic focus of the opposition lies in focusing on climate change as a capital issue. Use examples at the beginning of your case to establish that preservation efforts are failing and that public interest in environmentalism is largely variable. Explain that climate progress, like everything else, depends on funding–lobbying for environmental protections, development of green technology, and sea exploration are all expensive endeavors. As such, buy-in and literal capital are a prerequisite of environmental progress. Because opposition is the only side that can cleanly access these, you are the side with the greatest probability of having some sort of impact.
*An interesting example of this could be prison development in the Adirondacks. The prison development was problematic because it sought to use prisons as an economic solution to rural poverty, discounting the dehumanization associated with prison labor and the movement of prisoners further away from their families. However, much of the advocacy from regular visitors to the Adirondacks against the prison focused on not wanting people of color in their region. While this ethos was obviously terrible, the advocacy still prevented some of the prisons from being built, thereby preventing some displacement of the existing prison population and reducing prison expansion. This could be an interesting way to demonstrate impact over intention.
Further reading:
Aditi is a junior at Dartmouth College studying Biology on the pre-med track and helps coach WSD at Southlake Carroll High School. In her free time, she enjoys reading memoirs, finding new restaurants to try, and spending time outside.
This House believes that open-source development should be prioritized over proprietary innovation.
Framework
Background context
This is an incredibly relevant topic to be debating since open-source software already holds up most of the economy. A Harvard Business School study put its demand-side value at $8.8 trillion and estimated that firms would spend about 3.5x more on software if it disappeared.
The first thing to know is that open models caught up, and most of the best ones are Chinese. When DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025 under an MIT license, it matched OpenAI's best reasoning model at a fraction of the training cost, and Nvidia's stock dropped 17% in a single day. Chinese models passed American ones in Hugging Face downloads that summer, and by Hugging Face's Spring 2026 report they made up 41% of downloads. Alibaba's Qwen alone has more than 200,000 derivative models built on top of it. Then in July 2026, Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that landed just behind the top closed systems, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.
The American frontier, meanwhile, has mostly stayed closed. Anthropic held back Claude Mythos Preview in April 2026 because of its cyber capabilities and gave defenders access through Project Glasswing instead. OpenAI put out open-weight gpt-oss in August 2025 but still keeps its flagship closed. Meta launched Muse Spark as a closed model in April 2026 and later released Muse Glimmer, a smaller open model distilled from it.
In terms of the policy reaction to all this, Anthropic reported that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used about 24,000 fraudulent accounts and 16 million exchanges to distill Claude. After Kimi K3, the administration started weighing sanctions, Entity List designations, and procurement limits on Chinese open models, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said open source "is not open season on American IP." A coalition led by Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta pushed back with a letter called Open Weights and American AI Leadership, and nearly 200 startups in the Little Tech Association asked the White House not to cut them off from Chinese models.
Definitions and actors
By open-source development, I mean building technology so that anyone can use, study, modify, and share it. The Open Source Initiative's Open Source AI Definition goes further for AI and asks for information about the training data and code, not just the model's parameters. By that standard, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, Llama, and gpt-oss don't fully count, since they release their weights but not their training data, so "open weights" is the more accurate term. My advice to Proposition is to define the term broadly enough to include open-weight models just to take more of the hard stance.
Proprietary innovation is technology a firm develops and controls so it can capture the returns, whether through closed weights behind an API, trade secrets, patents, or restrictive licenses. One nuance I find useful is that patents are actually a disclosure bargain, where you publish how something works in exchange for temporary exclusivity. Opposition can use that to argue proprietary systems aren't inherently secretive, and Proposition can use it to argue that AI's version of proprietary is unusually closed.
"Prioritized" here importantly doesn’t mean fully banning proprietary work. It means that when the two compete for public money, regulatory favor, procurement, corporate strategy, or prestige, open development wins the tie. In practice that could look like compute and research funding conditioned on open release, procurement preferences for open models, no restrictions on releasing weights, etc.
As for the actor here, I think governments and international bodies make the most sense as the primary actors, with firms, universities, and funders behind them.
Proposition
I think the heart of prop case is pretty intuitive. Open development lets everyone build on the best ideas right away, while proprietary development lets a few firms decide who gets access, on what terms, and at what price.
S1: Compounding innovation
How exactly does this happen? - 3 mechanisms
Permissionless experimentation - ie: most attempts at innovation fail, so the number of attempts matters, and when anyone can download a model and test an idea without asking, the world runs far more experiments. Hugging Face now hosts more than 2 million public models, and independent developers' share of downloads has gone from 17% to 39%.
The second is recombination since every open release becomes a base for the next one. Qwen has more than 200,000 derivatives built for languages, industries, and tasks Alibaba never planned for.
The third is spillover. When DeepSeek publishes its architecture and training tricks, every lab learns from them, closed ones included. Meta's Avocado project, its planned closed successor to Llama, was reportedly trained partly on open models from Google, OpenAI, and Alibaba, and the transformer itself was published openly by Google researchers back in 2017.
For a general-purpose technology like AI, I'd argue diffusion is where most of the innovation actually happens. A hospital fine-tuning a model for radiology, a startup building a tutor, or a government adapting a model to a language with ten million speakers are all innovators in an open world. Diffusion also pushes the frontier forward, since DeepSeek's efficiency gains forced the closed labs to cut their prices. On impact, Nagle and Yue found that open models reach about 90% of closed-model performance at release, catch up within months, and cost about one-sixth as much, and that switching to comparable open models would have saved users around $25 billion in 2025 alone.
S2: Concentration of power
Frontier AI has huge fixed costs and almost no cost of serving one more user, which pushes the market toward a few dominant firms that then control price, access, and the rules of use. You can already see it happening in the status quo. Closed models take most AI revenue, and TechMarketView puts the leading closed labs in the high hundreds of billions of dollars, compared with about $24 billion for Mistral. Open weights break this up by commoditizing the model layer, which moves competition up the stack to where small companies can actually compete. That's why nearly 200 startups in the Little Tech Association asked the White House not to cut off Chinese open models, with one founder warning that hundreds of companies would "instantly die."
There's also a second-order effect which is regulatory capture. When protecting proprietary leaders is the priority, incumbents have every reason to push for rules that raise their rivals' costs. The New York Times reported that OpenAI and Anthropic lobbied to restrict Chinese open models, and the startups argued those curbs would mostly entrench incumbents.
S3: Upholding sovereignty
Closed models make users dependent on the provider and on the provider's government. In June 2026, a single Commerce Department letter forced Anthropic to cut off every foreign national, anywhere in the world, from its top models for about three weeks. Whatever you think of the reasons, the structural point is that access to a closed foreign model exists at someone else's discretion, while a model you've already downloaded can't be switched off.
That's a big part of why sovereignty now drives so much of open AI. Mistral raised €3 billion in September 2026, the largest equity round in European tech history, largely by letting customers like HSBC and ASML run models on their own infrastructure. Orange has said it can run Chinese open models on its own servers so data stays in Europe. South Korea, the UK, and Switzerland have all launched publicly funded model initiatives, and Nagle has pointed to African governments fine-tuning open models for local languages that closed models skip. The stakeholders here are the ones proprietary markets tend to underserve, like lower-income countries, minority-language communities, etc.
Opposition
Opposition's narrative I think is that frontier models cost billions to build, and that money only gets spent if there's a way to earn it back. Open source is great at spreading innovation but pretty bad at funding the riskiest kind.
S1: Funding the frontier of innovation
This is the classic economics of innovation. Knowledge is incredibly easy to copy and hard to fence off, so if there's no way to capture the returns, private R&D falls below what society actually wants, which is the whole reason patents exist in the first place. Frontier AI is the extreme case, with enormous training costs and almost no copying costs. If a model can be downloaded or distilled the day it launches, the company that built it captures very little, and investors start favoring fast-following over risky frontier bets.
The open frontier also relies heavily on the closed one. Anthropic documented more than 16 million exchanges by three Chinese labs training on Claude, and White House officials accused Moonshot of distilling an American model for Kimi K3, though some skeptics questioned the timeline. The biggest recent jumps came from closed labs too. AISI said Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5 delivered some of the largest cyber gains it had ever measured in April 2026, gains open models hadn't matched, and the gap was widest on long, multi-step tasks.
So on the big question of whether open source accelerates innovation, I'd argue it speeds up incremental and applied work, while proprietary incentives pay for the more transformative leaps we’ve seen.
S2: Irreversibility / reduction of safety guardrails
A good analogy is think of a car recall. If a carmaker finds faulty brakes, it can call the cars back and fix them. You can't recall a file that millions of people have already downloaded. The logic here is a company that keeps its model closed stays in control. It can watch for misuse, fix weak safety features, block bad users, and give the model to the "good people" first. With an open model, all of that is gone.
As an example of proposition world, Anthropic held back Mythos Preview and gave defenders first access, and in about a month partners found more than 10,000 high or critical vulnerabilities, many in open-source projects, with Mozilla alone fixing 271 Firefox bugs. Defenders get to patch before attackers get the capability, which is exactly how AISI described the open-closed gap, as a window to prepare. Also, a full simulated cyberattack cost about $85 on a closed frontier model and about $1.19 on DeepSeek V4-Pro, so open release doesn't just spread capability, it makes it much cheaper for attackers.
Proposition will bring up the Hugging Face breach because we’ve all heard of it and fearful of something like that. I'd say at least closed failures are visible and fixable. The concerns about Fable 5 were worked through with the government and it was back in global use within about three weeks, and OpenAI published a full report on the breach, whereas a flaw in an open model lives forever on millions of hard drives.
S3: Protecting against malicious actors
Open release is unilateral so adversaries' militaries and intelligence services get the capability and you get nothing back. Reuters reported in 2024 that researchers linked to China's military built a military model on top of Meta's Llama, and the June 2026 Fable 5 controls were reportedly driven by fears that foreign intelligence services could exploit it. Bessent's warning about American IP hands Opposition a ready-made frame here.
Also, prioritizing open source as a global norm plays to China's strength, which is open models, over America's strength, which is the closed frontier. The world's default AI stack becomes Chinese, along with whatever comes bundled in, and the US evaluation found DeepSeek far more vulnerable to agent hijacking and far more likely to repeat CCP narratives.
Additional Reading
Reports and Data
● State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026 (single snapshot of the open ecosystem)
● The ATOM Repor (great for the US-China download numbers)
● How Far Behind the Frontier are Leading Open Weight Models on Cyber?, UK AI Security Institute (both sides should read this one)
● The Value of Open Source Software
● Revealing the Hidden Economics of Open Models in the AI Era
Company and Policy Documents
● Detecting and preventing distillation attacks
● Statement on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access
● Open Weights and American AI Leadership
● Open Source AI Definition, (useful if the round gets into definitions)
Articles
● Trump's proposed ban on Kimi and other Chinese AI models could strengthen Beijing's hand
Sophia is an Econ & Stats student at Stanford who is passionate about global private equity, U.S.-China diplomacy, and East Asian financial markets. She is the ‘24 Tournament of Champions (TOC) winner and 2023-2024 Team USA Debate co-captain.
This House, as the United Nations, would abolish permanent membership on the Security Council.
Context (definitions, historical, contemporary)
The UNSC is the UN body responsible for maintaining international peace and security, and its decisions are binding on every member state. The UN was founded in 1945 by the Allied powers at the end of WWII. They had seen the League of Nations collapse after major powers refused to join or walked out, so they agreed to join only if they received permanent seats and a veto. Today, the UNSC has 10 elected members serving two-year terms and five permanent members (the P5): the US, UK, France, China, and Russia.
Permanent members do not face election, and each holds veto power. This means they can block any resolution, including the admission of new UN members and the appointment of the Secretary-General, and crucially, no reform of their privileges can pass without them. Their influence also goes beyond these formal powers. The US, UK, and France draft most Council resolutions, and the P5 are the only nuclear states recognized under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Additionally, the US and China are the UN’s biggest funders, contributing roughly 40% of its regular budget combined.
Framing
First – This is an actor motion, which means both sides need to debate from the perspective of the UN as an institution and define what its best interests are. These could include legitimacy, effectiveness, P5 retention, and financial stability.
Second – Proposition must show what the UNSC would look like without permanent members, and one of the most important considerations is re-election. Under the current rules, elected members cannot serve consecutive terms. If prop keeps that rule, then even if the US or Russia wins a seat, it would have to leave the Council for at least two years once its term ends. Proposition should also consider the informal effects of removing permanent membership on funding, enforcement of Council decisions, and peacekeeping contributions.
A potential model could keep the Council at 15 seats with two-year terms while removing the ban on consecutive terms and requiring a two-thirds majority to pass a resolution. This means world powers will be able to keep their seats for as long as they’re re-elected, and no single country can block a resolution on its own. Prop could also add a recall mechanism, allowing the General Assembly to remove a Council member by a two-thirds vote if it seriously violates the UN Charter. This would hold powerful nations accountable in a way the status quo never can.
Third – Opposition can either defend the status quo or run a countermodel, but in either case, it must be mutually exclusive with abolishing permanent membership. For example, opp could keep the P5 but add a new category of longer, renewable elected seats with regional allocation. This would give regions like Africa and Latin America a stronger, more consistent say without removing guaranteed seats.
Prop
Abolishing permanent membership would make the Security Council far more effective, and I see two aspects of this. First, it allows the Council to act on the crises that matter most. Today, whenever a crisis involves one of the P5 or its allies, solutions are rarely even considered because everyone knows they will be vetoed to protect a P5 member’s interests. Russia vetoed the resolution condemning its own invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has blocked more than a dozen resolutions on Syria to shield the Assad regime, while the US cast its sixth veto against a Gaza ceasefire in 2025 in a 14-to-1 vote. In 2026, Russia and China blocked action to protect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. In proposition’s world, resolutions pass with a two-thirds majority, meaning action with broad support finally goes through. Secondly, it forces great powers to negotiate. Without the ability to automatically say no, even the US or China would need to build coalitions and offer real concessions to elected members, many of which are developing nations that are currently ignored or overlooked. This ultimately strengthens global order, as the Council becomes a place where disputes actually get settled, and states have less reason to act alone or retreat into rival blocs. Beyond this, it holds countries accountable for the conflicts they start or fuel, allowing the Council to respond through humanitarian aid, ceasefires, and peacekeeping while it still matters rather than after years of deadlock.
Abolition would also give the Council the legitimacy it needs to be obeyed. It would fulfill the UN Charter’s principle of “sovereign equality” (Article 2(1)), which says every member state has equal legal standing regardless of its size, wealth, or power. Currently, five states hold seats forever because they won a war that ended eighty years ago, while Africa – which has 54 states and makes up much of the Council’s agenda – has no permanent seat and Western Europe has two. Under proposition’s model, every region competes for seats on equal terms, and you could argue that adding more permanent seats can’t achieve this, since any list of permanent members will eventually become outdated. Further, it makes powerful countries answerable for their conduct. Right now, no matter what a P5 member does, it never risks losing its seat. When every seat has to be re-earned from the General Assembly, even powerful nations pay a price in votes for aggression or blocking humanitarian action, giving them an incentive to behave better. This is significant because the Council has no army of its own and depends entirely on states choosing to comply with its decisions, contribute peacekeepers, and enforce its sanctions. A Council seen as fair and accountable gets far more of that cooperation, meaning its decisions are more likely to be carried out instead of ignored.
Finally, I think there is a compelling argument that abolition would strengthen nuclear non-proliferation. The five permanent members are also the only five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which asks every other country to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise that the nuclear states will work toward disarmament – a promise they have made little progress on. Tying permanent seats to these same five countries sends a clear message that nuclear weapons buy a guaranteed place at the top table. India criticized this two-tier system as “nuclear apartheid” around its 1998 nuclear tests. Removing permanent membership breaks that link and takes away a major status incentive for countries to build nuclear weapons. Abolition also makes enforcement more credible. While the Council sanctions countries like Iran and North Korea for seeking nuclear weapons, its permanent members can currently veto action against their allies, as Russia did in 2024 when it ended the panel monitoring North Korea’s sanctions. Without that shield, the Council can enforce non-proliferation rules more consistently, potentially reducing the number of new nuclear states and the risk of nuclear conflict.
Opp
Permanent membership plays an essential role in preventing conflict between great powers. First, it guarantees rivals a place to talk. Because permanent members can never be voted off the Council, the US, Russia, and China always share a standing forum, even at the height of tensions. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US used a Council meeting in 1962 to publicly expose the Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Meanwhile, Secretary-General U Thant proposed a pause in both the US blockade and Soviet arms shipments, which Khrushchev accepted, giving both sides room to step back. Secondly, the veto acts as a safety valve. Since any permanent member can block action, the Council can never be turned into a weapon by one bloc against another great power. This is exactly why great powers are willing to stay inside the system rather than build rival institutions or act alone. Since the People’s Republic of China took its seat in 1971, no two permanent members have fought each other directly, which is critical when all five are nuclear powers.
There’s also an argument to be made about how permanent membership makes the Council’s decisions enforceable. Because every permanent member must at least allow a resolution to pass, any decision the Council does adopt has already been accepted by the world’s most powerful militaries and economies, the nations most capable of enforcing it. In 2017, the Council unanimously imposed some of the harshest sanctions in its history on North Korea, including a cap on refined petroleum imports, with China and Russia (North Korea’s closest partners) voting in favor. Similarly, in 2013, a US-Russia agreement led to a unanimous resolution ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, and by April 2014, 92.5% of the declared material had been removed or destroyed. Because rival powers on all sides had to agree, these decisions could not be dismissed as one faction’s political weapon. Countries aligned with either side were expected to comply, giving Council resolutions authority across the whole world rather than within a single bloc.
Finally, permanent membership secures the resources and capacity the UN depends on. A permanent seat gives the most powerful states a lasting stake in the institution, which is a major reason they continue to fund it. In 2025, the US and China were assessed 22% and 20% of the UN’s regular budget, and about 26% and 24% of its peacekeeping budget, meaning these two countries alone cover roughly half the cost of peacekeeping. If they lose their special status, they also lose much of their reason to pay for an organization that can now outvote them. The P5 also provide capacity that most elected members cannot. China is the largest troop contributor among the permanent members and reports having sent more than 50,000 peacekeepers since 1990, while the US, UK, and France draft most Council resolutions, and all five hold the institutional memory that comes from never leaving the Council. Without that money and capacity, peacekeeping and humanitarian missions would be underfunded and poorly equipped, leaving civilians in conflict zones without the protection they rely on.
Further Readings
TLDR: The core clash of this debate is whether permanent membership preserves peace and gives the Council the strength to act, or whether it entrenches a system where the world’s most powerful nations can never be held accountable. I hope my thoughts give you some ideas to research more about & feel free to check out these articles to read more!
What Does the UN Security Council Do?
Decolonizing the United Nations Means Abolishing the Permanent Five
Here's Why the UN Sat on Its Hands During 5 Years of War in Syria
Emily Hu is a sophomore studying Finance, Accounting, and Data Science at Indiana University. Aside from exploring new restaurants and rating them on Beli, she enjoys watching romantic comedies, making playlists, and thrifting.
