AI Firm Chiefs Urge UN Security Council to Set Safeguards
The heads of Anthropic and OpenAI told the UN Security Council that AI needs international safeguards to prevent it from becoming too powerful to control.
The chief executives of two of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies appealed to the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to establish safeguards for the technology they are building, warning that without controls it could escape human oversight.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, told the council that the risks extend beyond individual harms. "If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," he said.
His counterpart at OpenAI, Sam Altman, echoed the concern, cautioning that "we could lose control of the future to AI."
Both executives said the world's nations, acting through the Security Council, must put in place actual controls to keep the technology from becoming too powerful to rein in. They also urged that the power of AI not be concentrated in the hands of a single company or country.
The session in New York reflected growing unease among world leaders about who should make life-and-death decisions as machines grow more capable — humans or the systems themselves. The council met with technology leaders to consider whether AI's expanding abilities and reach should be governed, and if so, by whom. Among the unresolved questions: how such controls could be enforced, and at what point it might be too late to try.
The discussion followed a warning a day earlier from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres about "killer robots." Experts and European leaders have said such concerns are not exaggerated, describing the prospect as already real or dangerously close.