UN security council hears AI warning from tech leaders
The US rejected international AI controls, while China called for shared global governance
You don't often see OpenAI and Anthropic sitting across from national governments to discuss existential risk. That changed this week, as executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face addressed the UN Security Council on AI's rapid growth, a technology now moving from classrooms to battlefields with, by most accounts, few real guardrails in place.
Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner, warned the Council about the dangers of an AI which works independently of human controls, a danger of such nature that "none can contain alone and that does not respect the borders we defend."
This is how the tone was set for the discussion during which corporate representatives and diplomats mostly agreed on the level of the danger while disagreeing on how to deal with it.
The United States, describing itself as the leader in frontier superintelligence, rejected any push toward international controls on the technology.
China's representative, Fu Cong, took the opposite position, warning against major powers using AI dominance to pursue what he called "digital hegemony" and arguing that AI should remain "a shared asset for all humanity" rather than a game only rich countries can play.
According to Lewis Garseedah Brown II, Permanent Representative of Liberia, the UN Security Council cannot afford to be reactive and to wait for a total collapse to put together collective defences because "any technology that impacts war-fighting, sovereignty, and geopolitical stability is squarely within the purview of the Council."
At the same time, he emphasised that there cannot be either over-regulation or under-regulation of artificial intelligence, especially when it is connected to cyberattacks and autonomous weapons.
Amandeep Singh Gill, UN Special Envoy for digital and emerging technologies, mentioned initiatives such as the Global Digital Compact and the UN-sponsored Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.
China separately called for more open-source cooperation and pushed for tech companies to submit to public regulation and oversight.
Actor and UN Global Advocate Joseph Gordon-Levitt used his platform at the session to call for stronger accountability measures, specifically flagging AI's growing influence on children and its potential effects on attention spans and human relationships.
