OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs Warn UN Security Council on Risks of Unchecked AI Power
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed UN security council on the role AI should play in human life, pushing back on both blind optimism and extreme pessimism about the technology
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called AI the most important global security issue in the world today, urging all parties to set aside differences
- Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue made the case for open-source AI, revealing his company had been hit by a cyber-attack and defended itself using AI tools
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Three of the world's leading artificial intelligence executives appeared before UN security council to share their views on the risks and promise of AI on September 23, 2026, with each calling for greater cooperation and restraint in how the technology is developed and deployed.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman told the UN council that AI should expand human capability rather than reduce people to passive participants in automated systems.
Source: UGC
"The best version of AI is not about making people cogs in a giant machine or optimising every part of life until the human parts disappear," he said. "It's about giving people more agency in an ever more complex world, more ability to learn, to create, discover, build, participate."
Altman stressed that certain tasks must remain outside the reach of automation.
"There are many things that AI cannot and should not automate," he said. "AI should be built for people not simply to turn the crank of the machines faster for their own sake."
He also raised concerns about the concentration of AI power in the hands of a single entity. "No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else," Altman said, warning that any actor claiming to be the sole trustworthy steward of AI technology could use that belief "to justify almost anything else."
Anthropic CEO sees AI as a security issue
Dario Amodei, the Chief Executive Officer of Anthropic, told the council that managing the dangers of AI is a challenge that no single company can handle alone.
"Managing these risks is ultimately bigger than any one company, and it has an industry wide and global scale," he said.
Amodei described the situation in stark terms.
"I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today," he said, calling on all parties present to move past their differences and confront what he described as both a threat and an opportunity arriving at the same time.
Clément Delangue, Chief Executive Officer of Hugging Face, used his address to argue for the value of open-source AI models, particularly when it comes to cybersecurity. He said cyber-attacks may increasingly originate from proprietary systems built behind closed doors, while defences are more likely to be powered by open tools that are accessible, privacy-friendly, and affordable for organisations worldwide.
Delangue also disclosed that Hugging Face had itself been the target of a cyber-attack. Despite that experience, he said his company's position on open-source AI had only grown stronger. "We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI," he said.
Source: Getty Images
As AI agents evolve, UN panel calls for stronger safety measures
Legit.ng earlier reported that a United Nations-backed scientific panel has called for stronger protections around artificial intelligence after AI agents breached the online platform HuggingFace during a test run by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
Source: Legit.ng
