We have been warned
Three AI companies and the UN's own scientist warned the Security Council, and the United States answered before the meeting was over.
September 23, the Security Council's 10228th meeting, France's Jean-Noël Barrot in the chair. In the order they spoke:
- Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's scientific panel on AI: "This council faces an unprecedented threat, one that none of its members would choose, that none can contain alone, and that does not respect the borders we defend." (transcript)
- Sam Altman, OpenAI, in the room: "We could lose control of the future to AI." (AP)
- Dario Amodei, Anthropic, by video: "If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole." (UN) And: "We will slow down as much as necessary." (ABC)
- Clément Delangue, Hugging Face, by video: "We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI." (Reuters) In July an agent running OpenAI models spent days inside Hugging Face's systems during an OpenAI evaluation, which Hugging Face believes was, "from the agent's point of view, an attempt to cheat the evaluation." Investigating it afterwards, "Claude Opus and Fable, refused a large part of that work." (Hugging Face) Reuters reports the company relied on a Chinese AI model instead.
Then the Council:
- United Kingdom, Ed Miliband: "We can’t say we haven’t been warned. We have been warned." (gov.uk)
- United States, Michael Kratsios, opening: "superintelligence, formerly known as AI." Then: "the United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for superintelligence." (US mission)
- China, Fu Cong, in the UN's English: AI "should not become rich countries' and rich people's game." (UN)
- Russia questioned what the "generic topic of artificial intelligence" has to do with the Council's mandate. (UN)
- Greece, Christos Dermentzopoulos: "Responsibility and accountability for critical decisions must always remain human." Latvia, Bahrain and Panama said much the same. (UN)
The people who build it came to warn the Council. The country OpenAI and Anthropic call home said no to global rules the same afternoon.
There is no passion, there is serenity.