AI chiefs ask the UN Security Council for rules and Washington refuses

Executives from leading artificial intelligence organisations urged global cooperation on Wednesday to address risks from increasingly autonomous AI systems during a UN Security Council meeting⁵. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman appeared in person, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue joined by video conference⁵. Altman told the meeting that AI can either be more like a new renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like something else, saying that we have a choice in front of us⁵. Amodei said that if managed poorly, he believed AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole^3,9.

The United States rejected the pleas from OpenAI and Anthropic for global AI standards². Altman has called for risk evaluation standards, as have Amodei and Delangue². Trump told the General Assembly that the United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control artificial intelligence, and said it would henceforth be officially called super intelligence⁸.

Why it matters to investors

The unusual feature is which way each side is pushing. The labs building the systems are asking to be evaluated², while the administration is declining to build the machinery to do it⁸. Trump’s call to leave AI exactly where it is contrasts even with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s position, leaving the White House isolated in brushing off AI safety⁴.

Industry is not unified behind the labs either. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg rejected calls for cooperation on safety⁶, and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang characterised fears over AI’s existential threats as a distraction that is not grounded on science⁷. That split matters for pricing regulatory risk, because it means the lobbying pressure on Washington runs in both directions at once^2,7.

What to watch

Congress is the channel where the public position and the private one may diverge. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he does not believe Trump is really dug in against guardrails for AI, despite the president’s public campaign against restricting the technology¹⁰. Thune said he spoke privately with Trump as the issue was getting hot and reads the president’s pushback as aimed at public paranoia and noise around the subject¹⁰.

Thune also reads Trump’s position as a preference for companies devising ways to secure their own systems rather than Congress or the administration doing it, an approach that relies more on outside experts for guidance¹⁰. Watch whether any capability-based evaluation regime emerges from that route², and whether the labs keep asking publicly for rules their largest peers are arguing against^6,7.