At the UN, heads of Anthropic and OpenAI discuss risks

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pledged Wednesday, September 23 to slow down where needed to ensure the safety of new AI technology releases, as he addressed the UN Security Council. "We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe," he told the United Nations via a video address.

The current moment in AI development "calls for extreme care," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the UN Security Council on Wednesday, noting that the technology's advancement could accelerate rapidly. "The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and important to slow down," Altman said.

He was among tech industry leaders briefing an emergency meeting of the 15-member council, following weeks of global headlines about the risks of uncontrollable artificial intelligence and calls for a slowdown. Clement Delangue of Hugging Face is also expected to speak.

On Wednesday, Altman said his company would try its best to walk a "middle path." While "we don't want to fall into the trap of blind optimism," he cautioned against falling into "doomerism" too. Recently, OpenAI called for the United States to lead a global effort on establishing standards for artificial intelligence, noting that the US industry is at the technical frontier.