AI Executives Warn UN of Growing Risks, Commit to Cautious Deployment

Major artificial intelligence company leaders addressed the UN Security Council on Wednesday, calling for heightened vigilance as the technology evolves rapidly, with Anthropic’s CEO promising to slow deployments when necessary to ensure safety.

“This moment calls for extreme care,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated during an emergency session of the 15-member council in New York.

He cautioned that increasingly capable and autonomous AI systems could outpace institutional oversight or concentrate power among too few entities.

Altman joined fellow industry executives in briefing the council amid weeks of global headlines highlighting risks of uncontrollable AI and demands for a development pause—calls that US President Donald Trump has resisted.

“The industry must not accept excessive technological risk simply because the potential benefits are substantial,” Altman told the UN’s principal body.

He also encouraged governments to collaborate with the sector on decisions shaping AI’s trajectory.

“Throughout history, nations that compete have nonetheless united around shared interests and collective security when confronting transformative technologies,” he remarked. “We believe this must be one of those moments.”

Slowing down

Following Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated that as AI models grow more powerful, “even more stringent standards of safety will be required.”

He noted Anthropic aims to strengthen its capacity to prevent technology misuse.

“We will slow down as much as necessary to ensure that every successive AI technology we release is safe,” Amodei said via video feed.

“If managed poorly, I believe AI could pose a risk to humanity as a whole,” he added.

Other participants included Clement Delangue of Hugging Face, which recently suffered a cyberattack attributed to autonomous OpenAI software.

This incident marked the first in a series of events raising alarms about rapidly advancing AI capabilities.

In early September, researcher Jacob Coxon, formerly of both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his departure from the industry and accused both companies of “gambling with our lives” in the pursuit of self-improving AI models.

‘Middle path’

The executives’ remarks preceded a summit where Trump was expected to welcome Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with AI featuring on the agenda.

On Wednesday, Altman said OpenAI would pursue a “middle path.”

“We don’t want to fall into the trap of blind optimism,” he said, while cautioning against excessive “doomerism.”

Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist regarded as a founder of AI, told the Security Council that “more and more people are rightly worried about recent advances.”

“We must channel that concern into productive action,” he said.

Delangue of Hugging Face observed that while his company was targeted by AI, it also leveraged the technology to counter the attacks. “The world needs open-source AI more than ever to defend itself.”

Altman, Amodei, and other leading executives have advocated for global AI oversight.

OpenAI has urged the United States to spearhead international standards-setting, citing its position at the technical frontier.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced Tuesday that the UK would launch an initiative to establish global AI standards during its 2027 G20 presidency.

France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot similarly called for coordinated action within the UN framework and with companies to regulate the new era of AI.

However, diplomatic efforts may conflict with US policy.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, argued that rapid advancement does not warrant pausing AI development or imposing new governance structures.

Trump on Tuesday dismissed international AI regulation as a “globalist scheme.”

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

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