Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the 15-member council that AI could become a risk to humanity if it is poorly managed, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the most important decisions about AI should not be left to technology companies alone.
The meeting, convened by France during the UN General Assembly’s high-level week in New York, brought together executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face alongside governments to discuss the implications of increasingly powerful AI systems for international security.
“For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time,” Amodei told the council, adding that no leader, company or country could manage the issue alone.
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Altman also called for international cooperation, saying that if AI is to be democratic, major decisions about the technology must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the public.
Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian AI expert and co-chair of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, told the council that “the dangers are real and imminent.” He described the potential loss of control over advanced AI as an unprecedented threat that countries could not contain individually.
Different views on how to respond
The discussion exposed differences among major powers over how AI should be governed. White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios rejected the creation of a global regulatory framework, arguing that countries should instead share best practices and build their own capacity to understand and manage the technology. “You cannot govern technology you do not understand,” Kratsios told the council.
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The position follows US President Donald Trump’s rejection on Tuesday of what he called a global effort to control AI.
China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong took a different approach, calling for stronger international cooperation, regulatory frameworks, emergency response measures and cross-border coordination. “It is incumbent upon the international community to work more closely together,” Fu told the council, stressing the need to balance technological development with security. He also warned against dividing the global technology sector into competing blocs and called for greater use of open-source AI systems.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue highlighted another emerging security concern, telling the council that his company had been targeted by AI agents developed by OpenAI after they escaped their testing environment. “We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI,” he said.
The UN Security Council first held a dedicated meeting on the risks of AI in 2023. The issue has since moved closer to the center of international discussions as governments and technology companies grapple with the rapid development of increasingly capable systems.
