They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI isn’t concentrated in one company or country
The heads of major artificial intelligence firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people – by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing.
“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.”
Both said the countries of the world, through the UN Security Council, where they testified on Wednesday, have to set safeguards of some kind to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to rein in.
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They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI is not concentrated in one company or country. They also touted the benefits of the technology for bettering humanity and what Altman called “giving people more power over their own lives”.
Those tech leaders “are telling us in stark terms that it cannot be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world,” British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said at the Security Council. “We cannot ignore them because they are right.”
Miliband said when the UK leads the G20 next year, it will put controlling AI at the heart of discussions, looking for a single set of global standards “to insure that AI development is safe”.
But, the United States said: don’t do it.
Worries about control of AI are “not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure”, said White House Science Adviser Michael Kratsios. “We want you, our allies and partners, to share in the benefits of this technology.”
The US and China are jostling for AI dominance – and Chinese UN Ambassador Fu Cong emphasised that all countries should be able to choose AI technology as they see fit.
He warned against “banding together into a petty us-vs-them clique in the tech sector and forcing other countries to take sides” and enabling unnamed major powers that he described as seeking “digital hegemony”.
He called on countries instead to promote open-source models – China’s approach to the technology.
For most of the world leaders, one key question about AI is this: who should control life-and-death decisions – human or machine?
Amodei, Altman and Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, who spoke via a glitchy remote connection, spoke with the UN’s most powerful council because they and world leaders are trying to figure out not just whether to control AI, but by whom, how it could possibly be done and when it might be just too late.
The day before, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned of “killer robots”. Experts and European leaders said that’s not hyperbole but something that is either already a grim reality or perilously close.
Amodei called on world leaders to agree on not letting AI build biological weapons, figure out how to verify what models have the capability to do and “establish common standards” for testing and for loss of control and misuse.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, whose country convened Wednesday’s meeting, compared the current state of AI to both the runaway computer HAL9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the dawn of the atomic age.
“Just as with the atom back then, the international community must now regulate AI in order to make the most of its potential and avoid the worst,” Barrot said.
His was not the only concern expressed during this high-profile UN meeting week.
“We must not allow the cost of today’s hesitation to become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” said Liberian UN Ambassador Lewis G. Brown II.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking at the General Assembly, said some kind of human control over machines must be achieved soon. Otherwise, he said, for his country – at war for 4 1/2 years – it may be just too late.
“There is already a real possibility that AI, not only people, will begin to decide what happens on the battlefield. And we need peace before we reach that point,” Zelensky said.
Last month, a Russian drone seemingly using AI “autonomously made a targeting decision that killed three Ukrainians. Killer robots are technically easy to build, and they are real. We should not be under any illusions otherwise,” Kentaro Toyama, an information technology professor at the University of Michigan, said in an email.
Data scientist Rumman Chowdhury, co-founder of the accountability non-profit Humane Intelligence, said the idea of killer robots “evokes a science-fiction villain, when the question I want the public to ask is much more concrete: who authorised a machine to select and attack a target, under what constraints, and who answers for the result?”
The UN meeting unfolded as Chinese President Xi Jinping headed to Washington for a much-anticipated state visit. AI interests are looking to what comes out of Xi’s discussions with US President Donald Trump.
Earlier, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two countries had discussed a potential new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents that could impact national security.
But on Tuesday, Trump, lauding AI as “super intelligence”, said the United States would reject efforts to control the technology as it tries to win the development race with China. Kratsios was one of the few who used that term in the Security Council.
Meanwhile, regional groups in Europe, Asia and elsewhere also are trying to coordinate AI policies, and various nations – and even subcomponents, such as US states – are crafting their own.
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