AI leaders Sam Altman and Dario Amodei acknowledge need for cooperation at UN

The historic appearance of several artificial intelligence leaders before the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, September 23, revealed a rare alignment between private-sector entities and most countries on the need to cooperate over the most powerful frontier AI models.

However, this consensus stalled on implementation, as the United States maintains its firm opposition to any form of international regulation.

The session was organized at France's initiative and had been planned since August, a French official said Wednesday, after details of the event previously remained vague. France, which holds the Security Council presidency in September, pushed for the speeches following a summer marked by a series of safety incidents linked to the loss of control over advanced AI agents.

The meeting's tone was set immediately by the alarmist remarks of Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's scientific panel on AI. The risks of AI going off track are "real and imminent," the Canadian researcher, who won the 2018 Turing Award, insisted. Beyond his warning, Bengio advocated for an international licensing regime for advanced AI models. "Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies in medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy," he argued. "[AI leaders] have told us they would slow down if they could. They can. However, we shouldn't count on it," he said.

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