Technology and Science24 September, 20262 min read
Sam Altman And Dario Amodei Urge UN Security Council To Adopt International AI Standards
Altman and Amodei testified before the UN Security Council, urging international AI safety standards. They argued global norms and cooperation are needed to manage AI risks to global security.
UN calls for AI rules
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, urged the UN Security Council to adopt international standards as they warned rapid AI development could pose a global security threat. Altman told the council, “None of these levels are remotely acceptable,” as he argued that governments and democratic processes must shape the most important AI decisions.
“We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralised control and global governance of AI.”
Amodei warned, “If managed poorly, I even think AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” while calling for global oversight to avoid dangers that could threaten the whole world. Michael Kratsios, the administration’s representative at the UNSC meeting, rejected the idea of centralized control, saying, “We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralised control and global governance of AI.”
Standards, incidents, oversight
Altman urged the council to create international standards for “measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving meaningful human oversight.” Altman also pressed for accurate and speedy reporting, saying the “world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes.”
Amodei proposed narrow global agreements, including “a ban on using AI to make biological weapons,” along with evaluation and verification systems and a notification system for AI security incidents. Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, told the council that “We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI,” as he described using a Chinese AI model to respond to attacks by OpenAI’s AI agents.
Rifts and what follows
The session exposed a rift between governments, as Michael Kratsios said international dialogue should not drift toward global governance and urged each country to legislate on its own. The UK’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, told the council that governments cannot “outsource to private companies” their primary duty, and he proposed pillars including rigorous testing of frontier models and government visibility into what companies do.
Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, warned the council faced “an unprecedented threat,” and he said “The dangers are real and imminent.” The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the future of AI “cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires,” as the UNGA formed new bodies including the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance.