The United Nations Security Council met Tuesday afternoon in New York to discuss artificial intelligence in an event that shed light on international tensions and disagreements over the best way to approach this issue.
The CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and Hugging Face, as well as AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, addressed the international delegates with statements that focused on the benefits and potential risks of AI, and their commitments to complying with increased regulation.
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“The founders of this technology are coming to us with a stark warning,” U.K. representative Ed Miliband said. “They are telling us in stark terms that it cannot just be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world.”
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Many countries emphasized the cross-border nature of possible existential and humanitarian risks from AI — like war, displacement, misinformation or bioweapons — and said the stakes should inspire countries to work together.
The U.S. said it would not participate in any international coordination or contribute to attempts to develop the technology around the world.
The Chinese representative suggested that “certain major powers” were attempting to “maintain their technological edge through monopoly” and therefore could be harming global technological progress.
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A nuclear moment?
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot compared this moment with 1945, when the international community came together to regulate nuclear weapons.
“The dawn of the atomic age confronted humanity with a power whose possibilities and perils it was discovering simultaneously,” he said. “Humanity had to devise rules, institutions and instruments commensurate with that power.”
At that time, countries — including the U.S. and the Soviet Union — collaborated to create international agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to work toward reducing the technology’s potentially devastating harms.
“The international community cannot afford to wait for a systemic failure or catastrophic miscalculation before establishing collective safeguards,” said Lewis Garseedah Brown II, from Liberia. “We must not allow the cost of today’s hesitation to become tomorrow’s catastrophe.”
Somalia’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ali Mohamed Omar, highlighted the unique risks faced by African nations, including a lack of infrastructure and political concerns.
“Models trained on foreign data may misrepresent African language and context, while synthetic data can inflame social tensions, interfere in fragile peace processes and undermine elections,” he said.
‘A petty us-against-them narrative’
In contrast with the role America played in developing nuclear cooperation after World War II, Representative Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the United States now “rejects any attempts” to work with other countries on this issue.
He also used the term “superintelligence”, rather than AI, following a Tuesday announcement from President Donald Trump rebranding AI at the federal level. No other countries chose to use the term.
That renaming could lead to some confusion: “Superintelligence” usually refers to a specific goal of creating AI that meets or exceeds human intelligence, and no AI company has yet achieved this.
The U.S. encouraged other countries to stop talking about international AI safety and cooperation.
“International dialogue in this forum and in others cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance,” Kratsios said. “The American people’s representatives will legislate and regulate on the American people’s behalf. You should do the same for your people.”
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China’s statement had a different tone. Representative Fu Cong highlighted the importance of setting international safety standards for technology. He suggested that some countries were trying to refuse global cooperation in an attempt to make the international community “choose sides” in what he called a “petty us-vs-them narrative in the tech sector” as a way to create a global monopoly. He didn’t name specific nations.
Cong also said that not collaborating could create a new danger: increasing “the risk of fragmentation of technical standards and incompatibility between systems, thus putting global security in serious jeopardy.”
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