UN Chief Calls for AI Pact to Prevent Rise of Killer Robots
The secretary general of the United Nations stepped up his calls for regulation of AI to avert a dystopian future of rampant corporate power and killer robots.
Antonio Guterres used his final address to world leaders at the UN General Assembly to sound the alarm about the dangers of AI, arguing that the rapid advance of frontier models risk undermining nation states.
“We are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from government to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” Guterres said Tuesday as he appealed for international agreement on new AI safeguards.
“It is advancing at extraordinary speed and racing ahead of our ability to understand its full consequences,” he added.
After a decade at the head of the UN, the 77-year-old set out a bleak vision of a world wracked by war and “weaponized” hunger, accelerating climate change and dwindling respect for human rights and the rule of law. He singled out AI and the data-center arms race as the defining power in a period of dramatic change and, in a nod to the US and China, called for guardrails to ensure the technology can be developed safely.
“Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity to establish channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation,” he said.
World leaders converged on New York for the UN’s annual gathering at a moment of escalating anxiety after researchers at the most advanced AI developers warned that the technology could wipe out humanity without proper controls.
OpenAI, which opened the AI era with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, on Monday called for internationally agreed standards to ensure that AI can be developed safely.
Also on Monday, the UN’s AI panel of experts released a report cautioning that increasingly capable models could escape human control and leaders from over 20 countries and the European Union called for mandatory safety testing of advanced AI models and potentially a new global institution to ensure humans retain control.
Pope Leo in May said artificial intelligence should be “disarmed” to protect humanity, a warning that has been echoed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman [addressed] the UN Security Council on Wednesday and will attend a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. The rapid development of AI is one of the issues likely to feature in Xi’s meeting with President Donald Trump earlier in the day.
(Editor’s note: This Bloomberg article was published the day before Altman gave his speech at the UN. During his speech, Altman reportedly “touted AI’s benefits to productivity while also warning of its potential abuses,” according to The Guardian. He suggested that global governments and democratic institutions work together to shape AI so people don’t feel like the technology is “something being done to them.”)
On the sidelines of the UN meeting, Prime Minister Andy Burnham told a group of business leaders that he plans to use the UK’s role as host of the Group of 20 next year to push for a “single set of global principles and standards” around AI. The gathering include Apple Inc. Chairman Tim Cook and Ruth Porat, chief investment officer at Alphabet Inc.
Trump, however, is a key outlier in the AI debate.
The US president has resisted calls to slow the pace of development, arguing that doing so risks allowing China to overtake the US in the race to dominate the technology.
“Whoever wins AI, WINS!” he said in a social media post Monday. “We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way!”
A vast wave of investment into AI infrastructure has sent the S&P 500 to record highs this year and helped to sustain economic growth in the US ahead of mid-term elections in November.
The president likened the alarms around AI to fears about global warming and said that warnings that AI poses a threat to humanity are a “hoax.”
“What the president has said is, ‘yes, if there’s harm that comes from AI, we have to protect our country from it,’ but we cannot afford to not be at the leading edge of AI,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview on Fox News Tuesday morning. “It’s going to happen — and if it’s going to happen, we should benefit from it, and we should be in the lead.”
Guterres, for his part, has been warning about AI for nearly his entire tenure. In his first address opening the General Assembly in 2017, he said the technology could “boost development and transform lives in spectacular fashion,” but could also have a dramatic impact on labor markets, global security and “the very fabric of societies.”
Nine years later, his message has become more urgent. Those risks now extend beyond jobs and inequality to increasingly autonomous models behaving in unintended ways and AI being used to facilitate cyberattacks or the development of biological weapons.
“The danger is not technology — the danger is technology without accountability,” he said. “Humans are increasingly handing over power to machines, with artificial intelligence agents going rogue, and lethal autonomous weapons going from science fiction to military reality.”
“Killer robots must have no place in our future,” he added.
Photograph: AI branding; photo credit: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg