Altman and Amodei brief the UN Security Council on AI risks; the US rejects "global governance"

The UN Security Council met on 23 September to discuss artificial intelligence and international security, with France’s foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot in the chair. Heads of leading AI companies were among the briefers.

The executives

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking in person, said the world faces a choice between AI as “a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery” and “a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray”. Because models can increasingly help build their successors — so-called recursive self-improvement — he said the moment “calls for extreme care”, while warning against both “blind optimism” and “doomerism”. According to The Guardian, he argued that the most important decisions “cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone” and should be shaped through democratic processes.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, joining by video, urged “narrow” agreements that could win broad support — for example, a ban on using AI to make biological weapons — together with evaluation and verification systems and common standards for testing models for misuse and loss of control.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue called for stronger standards for monitoring and disclosing AI-driven cyber incidents. Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, described the current development push as “a race where everyone loses”.

The member states

France, Denmark and the United Kingdom spoke in favour of a common framework for managing the risks of frontier models; UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said governments cannot outsource the duty to protect their people to private companies. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios said international dialogue “cannot be allowed to drift towards global governance”. Russia’s representative questioned whether the general topic of AI belongs on the Council’s agenda, and China promoted its own global AI governance initiative.