UN Asks The People Building Skynet How Worried We Should Be About Skynet 🤖

The UN Security Council will convene Wednesday afternoon to receive a rare briefing on artificial intelligence risks from the chief executives and researchers building the technology. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI safety researcher Yoshua Bengio, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue are all scheduled to address the 15-member council, the UN body empowered to authorize sanctions and military action. Chinese AI firms DeepSeek and Moonshot, developer of the Kimi models, have also been invited to submit statements. France organized the session and holds the council's rotating presidency this month, with Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot chairing the meeting.

The briefing's concept note reportedly centers on AI systems slipping beyond human control, including models that could eventually conduct cyberattacks, manipulate elections, or design weapons without human oversight. Amodei will participate remotely. On September 12, he published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," in which he called on the AI industry to deliberately slow the release of increasingly capable frontier models and said Anthropic would grant outside evaluators permanent, staff-level access to audit its safety claims. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both publicly agreed within hours.

In the same essay, Amodei referred to China as "the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities" and argued that the U.S. should maintain restrictions on advanced chip exports to Beijing while simultaneously pursuing global safety cooperation with China. China's Foreign Ministry rejected the essay as counterproductive, with state media characterizing it as a "Cold War playbook" aimed at technological containment. President Donald Trump rejected the slowdown push, publicly dismissing AI takeover warnings as a "hoax" tied to the "Radical Left" and accusing Amodei of wrongdoing without providing evidence.

Days earlier, King Charles hosted executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Google DeepMind at a Scottish estate for an AI safety summit that produced discussions but no publicly disclosed agreements. Wednesday's UN session is similarly not expected to yield a binding accord, and arrives two days before Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24, with AI safety reportedly on the agenda alongside trade.