Altman pledges AI restraint at UN Security Council

Sam Altman addressed the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, framing frontier AI as a choice between "a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery" and "a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray," according to remarks published by OpenAI.

The operative line for the industry was a disavowal of race dynamics. "Beating companies in a competitive pace is not a reason to make rash decisions," Altman said. "Nor do we believe we are locked in a race where we are unable to do that. We have unilaterally slowed down in the past. We will do so in the future." He said no lab should build systems where it cannot make alignment, monitorability, and safety guarantees, and set an unusually stringent bar: catastrophe risk at 10%, 1%, or even 0.1% is "not remotely acceptable."

Altman named two failure modes — losing control of the future to AI, especially as systems approach recursive self-improvement, and concentration of power. "No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else," he said, adding that an actor who believes only it can be trusted "can use that belief to justify almost anything else."

He said he "largely agreed" with Yoshua Bengio, who also addressed the Council, and laid out three OpenAI principles, beginning with keeping people at the center of AI decision-making.

The remarks carry no binding commitment. OpenAI's published transcript continues past the excerpt available here.