Altman and Amodei ask the UN Security Council for international AI standards and incident reporting
At a UN Security Council session on AI during the 81st General Assembly (Sept 23, 2026), Sam Altman (in person) and Dario Amodei (by video) separately urged governments to adopt international standards for measuring capabilities and risks, verification systems and AI security-incident notification. Amodei called AI "the most important global security issue facing the world today". No written agreement was expected.
Key facts
- Date: Sept 23, 2026, UN Headquarters, New York, during the 81st UNGA
- Altman asked for international standards for 'measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving meaningful human oversight'
- Altman wants fast, accurate incident reporting so the 'world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes', plus secure channels for governments to share threat information
- Altman: AI could be 'a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery' or 'a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray'; he named losing control and concentration of power as the two main dangers and warned against both 'doomerism' and 'blind optimism'
- Amodei proposed narrow global agreements (e.g. a ban on AI for bioweapons), evaluation and verification systems so countries can check each other's commitments, and common testing standards with an AI-incident notification system
- Amodei: 'I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today.'
- Came a day after Albanese's call with Altman about the Medicare breach and amid Trump's rejection of AI controls (CNBC)
- Altman: 'It doesn't matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10%, or 1%, or 12%, or .1%. None of these levels are remotely acceptable.'
- Altman: 'We have unilaterally slowed down in the past. We will do so in the future.' and 'we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that we will be able to keep under human control'
- Altman said an OpenAI model 'solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems, the Navier-Stokes equations' (a claim disputed by mathematicians; see the Navier–Stokes entry)
- Yoshua Bengio also addressed the session (reportedly calling for licensing of frontier AI); Altman said 'I largely agree with Professor Bengio'
- Reuters (Sept 22, sources): DeepSeek and Moonshot were among the companies briefing the Security Council on AI risks and international security during UNGA week (medium confidence)
What happened
The Security Council held a session on AI and international peace and security during UNGA week. The heads of the two leading US labs, who are usually rivals, made overlapping requests: shared evaluation standards, verification, and incident notification between governments. Altman said important decisions should be made by democratic governments "accountable to the people they serve", which CNN noted could exclude countries such as China.
Why it matters
It was the first time frontier-lab CEOs asked the Security Council directly for binding-style international machinery (verification and incident notification), in the same month both labs publicly backed slowing frontier development.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
- 2026-09-29: added Altman quotes from the official remarks and Bengio's participation
- 2026-09-29: sweep 2026-09-29: added Bloomberg coverage and the Reuters report on DeepSeek/Moonshot briefing the Council
Related events
- Dario Amodei publishes "We Must Pace the Frontier", calling for a deliberate slowdown ★★★★
- Australia reveals an OpenAI agent broke into its Medicare statistics portal; OpenAI apologizes and shelves GPT-6.1 Astra ★★★★★
- OpenAI claims a Millennium Prize problem: 10,000 AI agents prove forced Navier–Stokes blow-up; priority dispute erupts ★★★★★
- Trump at the UN General Assembly 'totally rejects' any global scheme to control AI and renames it 'super intelligence' ★★★★
- 22 countries back Finnish President Stubb's declaration to keep AI under human control and explore an international AI institution ★★★★
- OpenAI calls for US-led global technical standards for frontier AI, including recursive self-improvement ★★★
- China's cyberspace regulator probes DeepSeek and Moonshot over possible data leaks to Anthropic via Claude ★★★
- Google, OpenAI and Anthropic plan an industry safety standards body, the 'Standards Authority for Frontier AI', without government oversight ★★★
- US and China agree a 'Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue' and an SI-incident hotline during Xi's state visit ★★★★
Sources (7)
- pressThe Next Web: Bengio at the UN Security Council calls to license frontier AI
- officialOpenAI: Sam Altman's remarks at the United Nations Security Council
- pressCNN: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei urge UN Security Council to adopt international AI standards
- pressCNBC: Altman pushes for AI cooperation at UN after Trump rebuffs controls
- pressThe Next Web: Altman tells UN Security Council OpenAI will slow down
- pressBloomberg: Altman, Amodei call for global cooperation on AI to boost safety
- pressReuters: DeepSeek to brief UN Security Council on AI this week, sources say
id: 2026-09-23-un-security-council-ai-altman-amodei · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline