AI Leaders Urge UN to Establish Global Safeguards
The leaders of prominent artificial intelligence companies appealed to the United Nations on Wednesday to take action to protect the world, or at the very least its inhabitants, by implementing regulations on the rapidly evolving technology they have been developing. “If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came the assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.” Both said the countries of the world, through the UN Security Council, where they testified Wednesday, have to set safeguards of some kind to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to rein in. They also urged for global efforts to ensure that the power of AI is not monopolised by a single company or nation. They also highlighted the advantages of the technology for improving humanity and what Altman referred to as “giving people more power over their own lives.” British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband stated at the Security Council that those tech leaders “are telling us in stark terms that it cannot be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world. “We cannot ignore them because they are right.” AI will be at the heart of G20 discussions Miliband said when the UK leads the G20 next year, it will put controlling AI at the heart of discussions, looking for a single set of global standards “to insure that AI development is safe.” But, the United States said: Don’t do it.
Worries about control of AI are “not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure,” said White House Science Adviser Michael Kratsios. “We want you, our allies and partners, to share in the benefits of this technology.” The US and China are jostling for AI dominance – and Chinese UN Ambassador Fu Cong emphasised that all countries should be able to choose AI technology as they see fit. He cautioned against “banding together into a petty us-vs-them clique in the tech sector and forcing other countries to take sides” and empowering unnamed major powers that he characterised as pursuing “digital hegemony.” He urged nations to advocate for open-source models, reflecting China’s methodology regarding the technology. For the majority of global leaders, a pivotal inquiry regarding artificial intelligence revolves around the following: Who ought to wield authority over life-and-death determinations – humans or machines? Amodei, Altman, and Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, who communicated through a problematic remote connection, engaged with the UN’s most influential council as they and global leaders seek to determine not only the necessity of regulating AI but also the entities responsible, the methods of implementation, and the potential timing of irreversible consequences.
The day prior, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a caution regarding “killer robots.” Experts and European leaders asserted that this is not hyperbole but rather a situation that is either already a grim reality or alarmingly close to becoming one. Amodei urged global leaders to reach a consensus on preventing AI from developing biological weapons, to determine methods for verifying the capabilities of various models, and to “establish common standards” for testing, as well as addressing issues related to loss of control and misuse. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, whose country convened Wednesday’s meeting, drew parallels between the current state of AI and the runaway computer HAL9000 from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as well as the onset of the atomic age. “Just as with the atom back then, the international community must now regulate AI in order to make the most of its potential and avoid the worst,” Barrot said.
His concern was not the sole issue raised during this prominent week of UN meetings. “We must not allow the cost of today’s hesitation to become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” said Liberian UN Ambassador Lewis G Brown II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, addressing the General Assembly, emphasised the urgent need for establishing human control over machines in the near future. Otherwise, he stated, for his country – engaged in conflict for four and a half years – it may be just too late. “There is already a real possibility that AI, not only people, will begin to decide what happens on the battlefield. And we need peace before we reach that point,” Zelenskyy said. Last month, a Russian drone seemingly using AI “autonomously made a targeting decision that killed three Ukrainians. Killer robots are technically easy to build, and they are real. We should not be under any illusions otherwise,” Kentaro Toyama said.
Data scientist Rumman Chowdhury articulated that the concept of killer robots “evokes a science-fiction villain, when the question I want the public to ask is much more concrete: Who authorized a machine to select and attack a target, under what constraints, and who answers for the result?” The UN meeting unfolded as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for a much-anticipated state visit. AI interests are focused on the outcomes of Xi’s discussions with US President Donald Trump. Earlier, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated that the two countries had engaged in discussions regarding a potential new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents that could affect national security. On Tuesday, Trump praised AI as “superintelligence,” asserting that the United States would dismiss attempts to regulate the technology in its pursuit to outpace China in the development race. Kratsios was among the few who employed that term in the Security Council.
