OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned the United Nations Security Council on September 23, 2026, that artificial intelligence could slip beyond human control if countries fail to work together. Speaking at the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, Altman said the world still has a choice about how AI develops, but the window to act is closing fast. His message was simple and direct: powerful AI systems are moving quicker than the institutions meant to oversee them.
“We could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible.”
Altman did not come alone. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, also addressed the 15-member council. He said poorly managed AI could become a threat to all of humanity. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue joined them, though a glitchy remote connection interrupted his remarks.
Altman’s Two Big Fears About AI
Altman told the council there are two ways AI progress could go very badly. The first is losing control of the future to AI. The second is AI concentrating power in too few hands. He said no single person, company, or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to force their worldview on everyone else.
“No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else.”
He argued that decisions about AI “cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone.” Instead, they must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve.
Altman also pushed back against the idea that AI companies are trapped in an unavoidable race. He said OpenAI has slowed down before and will do so again when safety demands it.
“The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and that they feel too important to slow down.”
Dario Amodei Warns of Humanity-Level Risk
Amodei spoke via video link and identified two central dangers: misuse of AI models by bad actors, including bioterrorists creating biological weapons, and model capabilities accelerating beyond what developers can control.
“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.”
He pledged that Anthropic would “slow down as much as necessary” to keep every new AI system safe. But he stressed that managing these risks is bigger than any one company. He called for common global standards for testing AI models for loss of control and misuse risks. He also suggested a ban on using AI to make biological weapons and a system for countries to verify each other’s safety commitments.
The US and China Split on AI Rules
The meeting, chaired by France, brought American and Chinese AI developers to the same table for the first time. China’s DeepSeek and Moonshot attended alongside OpenAI and Anthropic. But the two superpowers did not agree on what to do.
White House Science Adviser Michael Kratsios rejected the idea of new global governance. He said worries about AI control are “not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure.”
China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong took a different view. He warned against forming a “petty us-vs.-them clique in the tech sector” and called on countries to promote open-source AI models.
Experts Challenge the Industry’s Race Narrative
Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN International Independent Panel on AI, pushed back against the companies’ framing of AI development as an unstoppable competition. He told the council that citizens and governments should not accept the claim that companies are trapped in a race.
“The race is not a law of nature; it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.”
Bengio also warned that despite fragile trust among nations, “the race threatens every nation.”
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the tech leaders’ warnings could not be ignored. He said the UK will put AI control at the heart of G20 discussions when it leads the group next year, looking for a single set of global standards to make AI development safe.
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What the Warnings Mean for Everyday Users
The UN meeting matters beyond policy circles. AI tools are already inside phones, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. Altman said the best version of AI is not about making people cogs in a giant machine. It is about giving people more agency to learn, create, and build.
But he also said some statements from people working on AI sound like the plot of bad science fiction movies. That tension—between huge promise and real danger—sat at the center of the Security Council session.
No binding agreement came out of the meeting. The US made clear it will not accept new international controls. China called for shared governance but warned against dividing the world into tech blocs. Altman and Amodei left the council with the same message they arrived with: the technology is moving fast, and the rules are not keeping up.
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