AI leaders urge global rules at the UN Security Council

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged global standards for AI at the UN Security Council Wednesday — putting an international cap on weeks of hand wringing about the perils of AI among its top practitioners.

The details: Amodei urged the Security Council, which was meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, to start by supporting a global ban on using AI to make biological weapons and to adopt common standards for testing AI models and flagging misuses that are “significant to global security,” per CNN.

Amodei’s take: “I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today,” the Anthropic boss told world leaders. “If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.”

And Altman’s: “It doesn’t matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10% or 1% or 12% or 0.1%. None of these levels are remotely acceptable.”

Good luck with that: As noted above, the US and China have both resisted calls for global rules of the road on AI, making any Security Council action likely impossible.

Even the lowest-hanging fruit: During the Biden administration, the US and China did agree to the seemingly glaringly obvious proposition that AI should not be put in charge of nuclear weapons. Even that agreement took “more than a year” to negotiate, according to Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Also at UNGA: The royal family-linked Emirates Foundation announced a partnership with the Responsible AI Future Foundation (RAIFF) aimed at ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly shared, according to a news release.

Major focus areas include: Responsible AI governance, AI capacity building and education, and “AI initiatives designed to create a positive social impact in the UAE, the Middle East, and the Global South,” per the release, which was short on specifics. RAIFF is a partnership between G42, Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, and Microsoft.