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AI Industry Leaders' UN Appeal for Global Regulation
At the UN on September 23, 2026, AI leaders including Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman warned of AI's existential risks and called for global regulation, amid a broader industry debate over slowing AI development.
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On September 23, 2026, the heads of major artificial intelligence firms addressed the United Nations, urging global regulation of the technology they are building. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, "If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole" (SCMP, September 23). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman added, "We could lose control of the future to AI" (SCMP, September 23). Both executives said countries needed coordinated action, though details on proposed mechanisms remain limited in initial reporting.
This appeal comes amid an intensifying "pacing" debate among American AI executives about deliberately slowing development, and as researchers and start-ups work on tools to verify AI safety claims between the US and China (SCMP, September 23). The UN appeal also follows a broader pattern including a 20-country proposal for a global AI oversight body, the WAICO (World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation) initiative, and unusual bipartisan US political alignment—such as Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders jointly calling for AI safety restrictions.
The UN speech reflects growing tension between AI firms' competitive incentives to advance capabilities and their public warnings about existential risk, a dynamic increasingly scrutinized as US-China AI competition intensifies ahead of the Trump-Xi summit. It's likely to recur as a reference point for future AI governance debates, regulatory proposals, and safety commitments.