By Michelle Nichols, John Irish and Courtney Rozen
UNITED NATIONS, Sept 23 (Reuters) – Executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face will brief the UN Security Council on Wednesday amid warnings increasingly powerful AI technologies could soon improve themselves, slip beyond human control and threaten international security.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue are due to brief the 15-member council during the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.
Altman plans to urge world leaders to adopt benchmarks for measuring AI capabilities and assessing the safeguards companies put in place as they develop the technology, an OpenAI executive told reporters on Tuesday.
Council members, including leading AI rivals the United States and China, are also set to speak. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot will chair the meeting.
A European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the main objective of the meeting was to shine a light on the practical risks of AI losing control in ways that affect international security and the security of individual states.
“These are issues that fall squarely within the Security Council’s mandate,” the diplomat said. “The key question is whether we could one day face a situation where algorithms interacting with each other trigger a war. That is really at the heart of the issue.”
Ahead of a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington on Thursday, the US and China have discussed setting up a notification system for common goals and common threats that would cover AI-related incidents that rise to a national security level.
TRUMP WANTS TO ENCOURAGE AI, NOT REIN IT IN
Trump told world leaders at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that he “rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” AI, describing the technology as amazing, but noted that the US would be careful.
“We’re leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said. “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.”
“We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in. We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice,” he said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence poses risks that cannot be ignored, putting him at odds with Trump.
Guterres has long pushed for global governance of AI and in 2023 created a 39-member advisory body for one year, with members including tech company executives, government officials and academics from countries such as the US, Russia and Japan.
The 193-member UN General Assembly then created the Independent International Scientific Panel last year. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian considered one of the “Godfathers of AI” and co-chair of the panel, will also brief the Security Council.
The Security Council met for the first time on the risks of AI in 2023, when China said the technology should not become a “runaway horse” and the United States warned against its use to censor or repress people. Then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken chaired a Security Council meeting on AI in 2024.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, John Irish and Courtney Rozen; Editing by Howard Goller)
