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 on measuring the 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.
