OpenAI, Anthropic chiefs warn UN against unilateral AI control

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appeared before the UN Security Council at its New York headquarters on Wednesday to warn that no single nation or corporation should wield exclusive authority over advanced artificial intelligence systems. The executives urged international cooperation to prevent the technology from becoming a tool of unilateral dominance as capabilities accelerate beyond regulatory frameworks.

Addressing the council during a formal session on AI and international security, Altman characterized the technology as presenting a fundamental civilizational choice. "We have a choice in front of us. AI can either be more like a new renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray," he said. He insisted that AI "should be built for people, not simply to turn the crank of the machines faster for their own sake," dismissing some industry rhetoric as resembling dystopian science fiction while warning that "no one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else."

Bioterror risks and industry 'race'

Amodei outlined two existential threats posed by rapidly advancing capabilities, warning that AI systems could enable "bioterrorists to create biological weapons" while simultaneously facing the danger of "model capabilities accelerating beyond developers' ability to control them." He stated that "if managed poorly," artificial intelligence "could be a risk to humanity as a whole," describing the governance challenge as "the most important global security issue facing the world today." He pledged that Anthropic would "slow down as much as necessary" to ensure each new system is safe, but stressed that managing these risks is "bigger than any one company" and requires "common global standards for testing AI models for loss of control risks and misuse risks."

Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN International Independent Panel on AI and a prominent computer scientist, challenged the industry narrative that competitive pressures make an AI arms race inevitable. "Citizens and governments should not accept the companies' claim that they are trapped in a race," he told council members, emphasizing that "the race is not a law of nature; it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves." Despite acknowledging fragile trust among nations, he warned that "the race threatens every nation" and endangers global stability regardless of geopolitical divisions, urging governments to establish binding international frameworks rather than deferring to corporate self-regulation.