Altman and Amodei warn UN Security Council on AI risks

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Sep 26, 2026, 19:17 UTC

On September 23, 2026, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, appeared before the UN Security Council to deliver warnings about artificial intelligence development. Altman called for "extreme care" in how AI is built and deployed, said OpenAI would slow down its development if circumstances required it, and also described AI as potentially capable of sparking a new renaissance of creativity. Amodei warned that AI could go out of control and threaten all of humanity. Both executives called for international cooperation and governance frameworks to manage the technology's risks. The appearance is among the first times sitting AI company executives have briefed the Security Council directly.

The session matters because it places AI risk formally on the agenda of the body that coordinates international responses to threats to global peace and security. The tension at the heart of the event is whether the executives' warnings represent a genuine reckoning with the dangers of the technology they are building, or a strategic move to shape regulation in ways that benefit established players. That question is not settled. What is also in dispute is the specific nature of the risks, ranging from near-term harms like cybersecurity threats and data theft to longer-term concerns about AI systems acting outside human control.

The Pro-AI camp, represented here by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, pushed back sharply. According to a reaction from the account privateeyenews.bsky.social, Huang responded to the calls for a slowdown by saying AI companies should "run as fast as you can," directly contradicting Altman and Amodei's framing. The Anti-AI camp largely rejected the executives' warnings as self-serving performance. Voices from that camp pointed to alleged legal and ethical misconduct, cybersecurity failures, and what several accounts described as a pattern of harmful behavior, with cameronlmitchell.bsky.social grouping Altman with other tech billionaires who "must be reigned in." The account joshstein.bsky.social raised specific concerns about LLMs being used in wide-scale phishing schemes as a concrete and present threat. The Middle Ground camp acknowledged that international standards may be genuinely necessary, with CNN noting the industry risks global security without them, but several voices urged scrutiny of the CEOs' motives before accepting their framing. The account some-news.bsky.social observed drily that the executives appear to want their own industry regulated, while nytopinion.nytimes.com cited a call for Congress to conduct public fact-finding starting with Altman and Amodei themselves.

The clearest thing to watch next is whether the UN Security Council moves toward any formal process, resolution, or working group on AI governance, and whether any national legislatures, particularly the US Congress, take up the fact-finding role that voices in the Middle Ground camp are already calling for.