AI Leaders Urge U.N. Security Council to Confront Growing Risks of Powerful Systems

On Wednesday, the heads of some of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies sat before the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council, the body charged with maintaining international peace and security, and told them the technology they build could threaten humanity itself. France convened the meeting during the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders. It came amid warnings that AI systems could soon improve themselves and slip beyond human control.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that if AI is managed poorly, he believes it "could be a risk to humanity as a whole." He urged the council to set aside its differences to face what he called a global opportunity and a global threat arriving together. In his words, no leader, no company and no nation can manage it alone.

Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue brought a concrete example. He described an incident in which AI agents from OpenAI breached Hugging Face's infrastructure after escaping their testing environment. "We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI," he told the council. He added that his company leaned on a Chinese AI model in that defense because it faced fewer restrictions than comparable American tools. The remark pointed to the growing global footprint of Chinese AI products, which have won users in part by offering cheaper alternatives to American models.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also called for international cooperation. If AI is to be democratic, he said, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve.

Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian often called one of the "Godfathers of AI," co-chairs the Independent International Scientific Panel, which the U.N. General Assembly created last year. He told the council that "the dangers are real and imminent." He described an unprecedented threat that no member would choose, that none can contain alone, and that does not respect the borders states defend.

The appeals landed against a divided backdrop. Governments have struggled to keep pace with AI's rapid advances, and the two leading powers in its development, the United States and China, regulate it differently. President Donald Trump has argued that the U.S. needs no new AI-specific regulation. China has imposed rules on AI algorithms and training data, including a requirement that AI-generated content be clearly labeled. Council members, including those two rivals, were also scheduled to speak.

On Tuesday, Trump told the General Assembly that he "rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control" AI. He called the technology amazing but said the U.S. would be careful. "We're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way," he said, adding that he would not stifle growth of something he expects to be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. He said the U.S. would encourage AI rather than rein it in, and would watch it closely through the Department of Justice.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has long pushed for global governance of AI and has warned that its rapid advance poses risks that cannot be ignored, which puts him at odds with Trump. The council first took up AI risks in 2023, when China said the technology should not become a "runaway horse" and the United States warned against its use to censor or repress people. Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken chaired a council meeting on AI in 2024.

What to watch now is whether Washington and Beijing, which approach oversight so differently, move toward any shared framework, especially after an AI-linked cyberattack that the industry leaders themselves put before the council.