Executives from several of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies urged heightened vigilance over the technology’s rapid advancement at an emergency UN Security Council meeting Wednesday, with Anthropic’s chief executive pledging to slow the pace of development where necessary to ensure safety.
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told the 15-member council that the current moment “calls for extreme care.” Speaking after him via video feed, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said his company recognizes that increasingly powerful AI models will require “even more stringent standards of safety.” He said Anthropic would “slow down as much as necessary” to ensure each new AI system it releases is safe, and added that poorly managed AI could pose a risk to humanity as a whole.
Amodei also voiced support for establishing global testing standards for AI systems and an international ban on using the technology to assist in the development of biological weapons. Both remain proposals without an enforcement mechanism, and Amodei did not specify what circumstances would prompt Anthropic to delay a release.
Altman, for his part, argued that major decisions concerning AI’s development should involve democratic processes and accountable governments rather than being left solely to the companies building the technology.
Also addressing the council was Clement Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face, whose platform was recently targeted in a cyberattack attributed to autonomous software developed by OpenAI, one of a series of recent incidents that have heightened concern over the technology’s rapid, largely unsupervised evolution.
The session took place alongside the UN General Assembly’s high-level week, at a time when concerns over insufficiently regulated AI have featured prominently among the issues facing world leaders gathered in New York. It also follows a September 12 essay in which Amodei had already called publicly for an industry-wide slowdown.
The Trump administration has previously rejected calls for international AI regulation, with White House officials favoring a more permissive approach to the technology’s development within the United States.
