Top AI industry leaders tell UN Security Council that rapid tech growth poses global security threats

Executives from three major artificial intelligence companies briefed the UN Security Council on Wednesday to warn that fast-advancing AI systems could soon improve themselves, slip beyond human control, and threaten international security. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue spoke to the 15-member council during the annual General Assembly gathering in New York. Amodei told the council that AI could pose a risk to humanity as a whole if managed poorly. Altman stressed that global cooperation is needed and that important decisions must be shaped through democratic processes rather than by labs in San Francisco alone. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian researcher known as a Godfather of AI and co-chair of a UN scientific panel, also told the council that the dangers are real, imminent, and do not respect national borders. Governments are currently struggling to keep pace with the technology. The United States and China remain divided over whether to use global guardrails or leave AI development to market forces, though the two countries have discussed setting up a notification system for national security-level AI incidents ahead of talks between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Trump stated at the UN General Assembly that he wants to encourage AI growth and reject global control schemes, while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the risks cannot be ignored.