AI company leaders: For the sake of humanity, we beg you to control this technology we have created

The heads of leading artificial intelligence companies have appealed to the United Nations to save the world, or at least its people, by somehow introducing regulations for the rapidly developing technology they have designed.

“If it is poorly managed, I even believe that artificial intelligence could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, yesterday.

His competitor, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, stated: “We could lose the ability to plan for the future because of artificial intelligence.”

Both said in their address to the UN Security Council that all countries in the world must establish some safeguards to prevent this technology from becoming too powerful and to keep it in check.

They also called on the world to ensure that the power of artificial intelligence is not concentrated in a single company or country. They outlined the benefits of this technology for advancing humanity and, as Altman said, for “giving people more power over their own lives.”

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said that these technology leaders are speaking in strong terms because they want to prevent a catastrophe from befalling the world.

“We cannot ignore them because they are right,” said Miliband.

Miliband said that when Britain chairs the G20 group next year, it will put the control of artificial intelligence at the center of discussions and seek a unified set of global standards to ensure that “the development of artificial intelligence is safe.”

But the United States has assessed that this should not be done.

Concerns about controlling artificial intelligence are not a reason to slow its further development or to restrict it with a new global governance structure, said White House science advisor Michael Kratsios.

“We want you, our allies and partners, to share in the benefits of this technology,” he said.

The US and China are competing for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, and Chinese Ambassador to the UN Fu Cong emphasized that all countries should have the opportunity to choose the artificial intelligence technology they believe suits them.

He called on countries around the world to strive to promote open-source models, which is the Chinese approach to this technology.

For most world leaders, the key question regarding artificial intelligence is who should control decisions of life and death, humans or machines, writes the AP agency.

Amodei, Altman, and the CEO of Hugging Face, who addressed the meeting via video link, spoke with the UN’s most powerful body because they and world leaders are trying to resolve not only whether to control artificial intelligence, but who should control it, how it could be done, and when it might be too late.

The day before, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned about “killer robots.” Experts and European leaders said this is not an exaggeration but a grim reality, or dangerously close to becoming one.

Amodei called on world leaders to agree not to allow artificial intelligence to build biological weapons, to determine how to check which models have the capacity to do so, and to establish “common standards” for testing, loss of control, and misuse.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, whose country convened yesterday’s meeting, compared the current state of artificial intelligence to the runaway computer HAL9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to the beginning of the atomic age.

“As with the atom then, the international community must regulate artificial intelligence to best utilize its potential and avoid the worst,” said Barrot.

He was not the only one to express concern during this week’s high-level meeting at the UN General Assembly session.

“We must not allow the costs of today’s hesitation to become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” said Liberia’s ambassador to the UN, Lewis Brown II.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his address to the General Assembly, said that some form of human control over machines must soon be established, or, as he said, for his country, which has been at war for more than four and a half years, it will be too late.

“There is already a real possibility that artificial intelligence, and not just humans, could begin to decide what will happen on the battlefield. And we need peace before we reach that point,” Zelensky said.

Last month, a Russian drone that apparently used artificial intelligence “autonomously made the decision about where to target and killed three Ukrainians,” said Kentaro Toyama, professor of information technology at the University of Michigan, in an email. He said it is easy to make a killer robot and that they are real, and that there should be no illusion that this is not the case.

The UN meeting took place while Chinese President Xi Jinping was on his way to Washington. Attention is focused on what the two presidents, Xi and US President Donald Trump, will agree on regarding artificial intelligence. Earlier, US Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said that the two countries had discussed a potential “notification mechanism” for artificial intelligence incidents that could impact national security.

But on Tuesday, Trump praised artificial intelligence as “superintelligence” and said that the US would reject efforts to control this technology while trying to beat China in the race for its development.

At the same time, regional groups in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere are trying to coordinate artificial intelligence policies, while individual countries are devising their own policies.