OpenAI and Anthropic bosses push UN for global terms on AI
OpenAI's Sam Altman has called for risk evaluation standards, as have Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Hugging Face's Clement Delangue.
OpenAI and Anthropic leaders urge UN to set global AI rules
The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face told the UN that the current speed of artificial intelligence (AI) development, along with the risks it poses to society, requires international coordination on a global scale.
Altman called for shared standards for risk assessment, as did Dario Amodei of Anthropic, a major competitor to OpenAI, and Clement Delangue of Hugging Face.
Earlier this month, Amodei published an essay that Altman and others welcomed, calling for a slowdown in AI development because of fears about the technology’s threat to humanity.
But at the same UN conference, a key technology adviser to US President Donald Trump rejected the idea of any new form of AI regulation.
Michael Kratsios, a former Uber executive, acknowledged that AI development is accelerating and that the technology carries risks, but told the UN that this was not enough reason "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.
Sam Altman of OpenAI and other AI chief executives took the opposite view in their remarks 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 begin working together toward "the collective good in the face of powerful new technology."
He called for "national and international" AI standards on how to measure an AI tool’s capabilities, assess related risks, apply AI safeguards, and determine the extent to which human oversight over such tools is preserved.
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.
Anthropic’s Amodei and Hugging Face’s Delangue made similar remarks 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 requires "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 executives are based in the US and are directly involved in the development of AI technology.
Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, more recently gained 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.