Top technology leaders on Wednesday called on the United Nations to develop effective global safeguards to regulate the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence.
Speaking before the UN Security Council, Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei warned that the consequences of poorly managed AI could extend to humanity as a whole.
“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Amodei told the council.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also called for complementary national and international standards for frontier AI, warning that humanity could lose control of the future to artificial intelligence.
Altman proposed standards for measuring AI capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are adequate and maintaining meaningful human oversight as AI systems become increasingly autonomous.
He said common standards would enable countries to compare evidence, verify compliance and establish a shared understanding of developments in artificial intelligence.
Altman also stressed the importance of rapid incident reporting, classification protocols and secure communication channels between governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts working on emerging AI threats.
According to him, the standards should not favour any particular business model and should accommodate both open and closed AI models, new entrants and established laboratories, while supporting national authority and international cooperation.
“Each government should decide how to incorporate standards into its own legal system,” he added. “We will all be better off if we can agree on what good evidence, safeguards, and oversight look like on the global stage.”
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband urged the Security Council to take seriously the warnings from AI industry leaders, stressing that governments must not surrender their responsibilities to citizens or private companies.
“They are telling us that it cannot just be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world,” he said. “We cannot ignore them because they are right.”
Miliband acknowledged that AI has significant potential to drive economic growth, contribute to disease treatment and improve people’s life chances. However, he stressed that necessary measures must be taken to ensure that the technology remains secure, safe and trustworthy.
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