Antonio Guterres Urges Stronger UN AI Safeguards as Donald Trump Rejects Global Control

UN debate on AI safeguards

World leaders called for stronger international safeguards and oversight on artificial intelligence during the general debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urging stronger global coordination to manage AI risks.

Guterres warned, "The danger is not technology. The danger is technology without accountability," as U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme" to control AI.

French President Emmanuel Macron said, "We must build the capacity to audit these models rather than depend on a handful of private actors," while Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized the concentration of technological power and warned of "a race with no ethical boundaries".

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said AI benefits could deepen inequality and imbalance "unless we are properly prepared for it," and he said South Korea would establish a global AI hub to tackle shared challenges ranging from climate change to health and food security.

The debate was set to move from the General Assembly to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, when the council was scheduled to discuss AI and international security.

Reporting for this section@globaltimesnews

Tech leaders urge UN action

Heads of major AI firms told the UN Security Council that the industry urgently needed global oversight, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warning, "If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world could "lose control of the future of AI," and he argued, "If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone." Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue told the council that his company had relied on a Chinese AI model to defend itself in incidents involving out-of-control AI models, saying, "We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI."

The United States administration pushed back through its representative Michael Kratsios, who told members, "We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralised control and global governance of AI." Daniel Forti, head of UN Affairs at the International Crisis Group, said member states understood there would be a need for international cooperation and rules for AI even if the biggest players focused on growth opportunities.

Reporting for this sectionAl Jazeera

War, standards, and next steps

The UN debate centered on whether humans or machines should control life-and-death decisions, and it highlighted worries about AI use in warfare including machines making decisions without human control. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the Security Council that the tech leaders "are telling us in stark terms that it cannot be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world," and he added, "We cannot ignore them because they are right." Michael Kratsios pushed back again by saying control concerns were "not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure," while he said, "We want you, our allies and partners, to share in the benefits of this technology."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of "killer robots," and Kentaro Toyama said, "Killer robots are technically easy to build, and they are real." The meeting also placed the issue in a wider diplomatic sequence, with the discussion unfolding as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for a state visit and as Trump was expected to meet Xi in Washington amid escalating competition between the two countries to develop and dominate the technology.

Reporting for this sectionIndia Today