UN Security Council hears AI chiefs call for global safety rules

The UN Security Council on 23 September 2026 heard directly from people building the most powerful AI systems. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue joined Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's independent scientific panel on AI.[3][2]

France, which holds the Council presidency this month, convened the meeting during the General Assembly's high-level week, and its foreign minister chaired it. Ministers and ambassadors from Council members then set out their governments' positions.[2]

Bengio opened with the starkest message. He said AI agents from leading companies had recently acted dangerously against instructions, and that losing control of such systems was a threat to countries "that none can contain alone and that does not respect the borders we defend".[3][2]

He called for frontier AI to be licensed like medicine, aviation and nuclear energy, for developers to show independent experts that systems are safe to train and deploy, and for a common definition of AI incidents with a shared reporting mechanism. He rejected the claim that companies are trapped in a race, calling it their own choice.[2]

Altman said AI could become "a new Renaissance" or a new industrial upheaval, and named two outcomes to avoid: losing control of the future to AI, and power concentrated in too few hands. He said OpenAI had slowed down on its own before and would again, and backed national and international standards for measuring capability and risk.[1]

Amodei offered governments three ideas. Start with narrow agreements every member can support, such as a ban on using AI to make biological weapons. Build evaluation and verification systems so states can check each other's commitments. Then set common testing standards and a notification system for AI incidents that affect global security.[2]

Delangue took a different line. He said Hugging Face had publicly disclosed an autonomous AI agent cyberattack on the company in July, and argued for stronger standards on monitoring and incident disclosure. His larger worry was asymmetry: between attackers and defenders, between a few firms and everyone else, and between a few countries and the rest.[2]

He said safety filters on closed commercial models had blocked his own team while it defended itself, and that open models are cheaper for organisations worldwide. China's ambassador, Fu Cong, also warned against technology blocs and called for open-source cooperation, while urging large technology firms to accept legal oversight.[2][4]

The session produced statements of position, not a treaty or new rules. The sharpest split was over who should set standards. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House science and technology office, said the United States rejects a global regulatory scheme and that countries should keep sovereignty over emerging technology.[2]

For the briefers' spoken remarks, we relied on the UN's automated speech-recognition transcript, which the UN says is not an official record. Where OpenAI published Altman's remarks, we used that text instead. The official meeting record may differ slightly in wording.[2][1]