AI Leaders Urge Global Safety Standards at UN as Trump Adviser Rejects New Regulation

The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face told the United Nations that the rapid pace of artificial intelligence development, and the risks it poses to society, require international coordination.

OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face call for common AI standards

OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Hugging Face’s Clement DeLang called for a shared standard to assess AI risks.

Earlier this month, Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in AI development over concerns about the technology’s potential threat to humanity. Altman and others welcomed the essay.

At the same United Nations conference, however, US President Donald Trump’s chief technical adviser rejected the idea of introducing new AI regulation.

Trump adviser rejects calls to pause AI development

Michael Kratsios, a former executive at Scale AI, acknowledged that AI development was accelerating and that the technology posed risks. However, he told the UN that those concerns were not enough to justify pausing development or restricting it through new global governance structures.

“We cannot allow the international dialogue in this or any other forum to move towards global governance,” Kratsios said.

His comments echoed similar statements made by President Trump in recent weeks.

Trump told the United Nations on Tuesday that he wanted to rebrand AI as “superintelligence” and strongly opposed any proposal to slow its development, citing the United States’ competitive advantage in the field.

“We are leading China in AI…and frankly, we want to keep it that way because whoever wins in AI wins,” he said earlier this month.

Sam Altman calls for international AI cooperation

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and other AI executives presented a different view during talks with the United Nations on Wednesday.

“If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made solely in a lab in San Francisco,” Altman said.

He told the United Nations that he hoped countries would begin working together in the “collective interests in the face of powerful new technologies.”

Altman called for “national and international” AI standards covering the measurement of AI capabilities, risk assessment, safeguards and the degree of human oversight applied to AI tools.

He also called for rapid incident reporting, classification and reporting protocols so countries can learn from mistakes before they develop into a global catastrophe.

“We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify compliance, have a common language and understand what’s going on,” Altman added.