AI Leaders Urge UN For Global Safeguards, Warn Uncontrolled Technology Could Risk Humanity

New York, September 24, 2026: The heads of major artificial intelligence companies have urged the United Nations to establish safeguards for the rapidly developing technology, warning that poorly controlled AI could pose serious risks to humanity.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered a similarly stark assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.”

Both executives said countries, working through the UN Security Council, needed to establish safeguards to prevent AI from becoming too powerful to control. They also urged governments to ensure that AI power was not concentrated in a single company or country.

At the same time, they highlighted the technology’s potential benefits, including what Altman described as “giving people more power over their own lives.”

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the warnings from technology leaders could not be dismissed.

Those executives “are telling us in stark terms that it cannot be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world,” Miliband said. “We cannot ignore them because they are right.”

AI At Heart Of G20 Talks

Miliband said the UK would put AI controls at the centre of discussions when it leads the G20 next year, seeking a single set of global standards “to insure that AI development is safe.”

The US, however, opposed imposing new international controls.

Concerns about AI are “not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure,” White House Science Adviser Michael Kratsios said. “We want you, our allies and partners, to share in the benefits of this technology.”

The US and China are competing for dominance in AI, while Chinese UN Ambassador Fu Cong stressed that countries should be free to choose AI technologies according to their needs.

Fu warned against “banding together into a petty us-vs-them clique in the tech sector and forcing other countries to take sides” and criticised unnamed major powers seeking “digital hegemony.” He instead called for countries to promote open-source models, reflecting China’s approach to the technology.

Who Controls Life-And-Death Decisions?

A central concern for world leaders is whether humans or machines should control life-and-death decisions.

Amodei, Altman and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, who addressed the meeting remotely, spoke to the Security Council as governments grapple with whether AI should be controlled, who should regulate it and how such oversight could work.

A day earlier, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned about “killer robots.” Experts and European leaders said the prospect was either already a reality or dangerously close to becoming one.

Amodei urged world leaders to agree that AI should not be allowed to build biological weapons, develop ways to verify the capabilities of AI models and “establish common standards” for testing, misuse and the potential loss of control.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, whose country convened Wednesday’s meeting, compared the current stage of AI development with both the HAL9000 computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the beginning 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.

‘Killer Robots’ Raise Battlefield Fears

Concerns about the military use of AI also featured prominently during the high-profile UN meeting week.

“We must not allow the cost of today’s hesitation to become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” Liberian UN Ambassador Lewis G Brown II said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the UN General Assembly that human control over machines needed to be secured soon, warning that AI could increasingly determine what happens on battlefields.

“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.

Kentaro Toyama, an information technology professor at the University of Michigan, said a Russian drone apparently using AI had autonomously selected a target last month, killing three Ukrainians.

“Killer robots are technically easy to build, and they are real. We should not be under any illusions otherwise,” Toyama said in an email.

Data scientist Rumman Chowdhury, co-founder of accountability non-profit Humane Intelligence, said the term 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?”

US And China Differ On AI Controls

The UN discussions coincided with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Washington for a state visit, with AI interests watching for developments from his talks with US President Donald Trump.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had earlier said the two countries discussed a possible new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents that could affect national security.

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On Tuesday, however, Trump described AI as “superintelligence” and said the US would reject attempts to control the technology as it seeks to prevail in the development race with China. Kratsios was among the few speakers at the Security Council meeting to use the term.

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