OpenAI and Anthropic bosses push UN for global terms on AI

The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face have told the UN that the current pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development, and the risks it poses to society, demands international coordination.

Altman called for common risk evaluation standards, as did Dario Amodei of Anthropic, a main rival of OpenAI, and Clement Delangue of Hugging Face.

Earlier this month, Amodei wrote an essay welcomed by Altman and others calling an AI development slowdown in response to fears about the technology's threat to humanity.

However, at the same UN conference, a key technology advisor to US President Donald Trump, rejected the idea any new form of AI regulation.

Michael Kratsios, a former Uber executive, admitted that the speed of AI development is increasing and that there are risks presented by the technology, but told the UN this was not reason enough "to pause development or constrain it with new global governance structures".

"International dialogue in this forum and others cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance," Kratsios added.

Kratsios's comments echoed similar statements made by Trump in recent weeks.

Trump told the UN on Tuesday he wanted to rebrand it "super intelligence" and has strongly opposed any idea of an AI slowdown because of the US's competitive advantage in the sector.

"We're leading China on AI... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins," he said earlier this month.

Sam Altman of OpenAI and other AI chief executives expressed a different view in their talks to the UN on Wednesday.

"If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone," said Altman.

He told the UN that he wanted countries to start working together toward "the collective good in the face of powerful new technology."

He called for "national and international" AI standards regarding ways to measure capabilities of an AI tool, assessing related risks, AI safeguards, and the degree to which human oversight over such tools is maintained.

He also called for "speedy incident reporting, classification and reporting protocols so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes."

"We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify compliance, and have a shared language and understanding what is happening," Altman added.

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Anthropic's Amodei and Hugging Face's Delangue made similar comments in their speeches.

Amodei said that AI "if managed poorly... could be a risk to humanity as a whole."

He added that further development of AI tools calls for "even more stringent standards of safety".

"We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe," Amodei added.

"But regardless of what we do, managing these risks is ultimately bigger than any one company, and it has an industry-wide and global scale."

Hugging Face's Delangue said: "The global community needs stronger standards for monitoring and incident disclosure."

All three of the executives are based in the US and directly involved in the development of AI technology.

Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, more recently rose to prominence after it admitted to being hacked by AI agents, or AI bots that operate somewhat autonomously, that came out of OpenAI.

Hugging Face has since been acquired by AI chipmaker Nvidia.

The Hugging Face hack has been treated as a 'wake-up call' within the industry for the ways in which AI technology has advanced and could hypothetically act in ways that could harm humanity.