The leaders of three major artificial intelligence companies asked the United Nations on Wednesday to support shared global standards for AI safety. The United States government rejected the idea at the same conference.
Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Clement Delangue of Hugging Face all spoke at the UN. Each said the fast pace of AI development calls for international coordination.
Tech Leaders Ask for Shared Rules
Altman said decisions about AI should not rest with a small group of companies. "If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone," he said.
He called for national and international standards for measuring what AI tools can do. He also wanted common ways to assess risks, set safeguards, and track how much human oversight is kept over these tools.
Altman asked for fast incident reporting so the world "can learn from failures before they become catastrophes." He said common standards would help countries compare evidence and check whether rules are being followed.
Amodei said that AI "if managed poorly... could be a risk to humanity as a whole." He added that each new AI tool needs "even more stringent standards of safety."
"We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe," Amodei said. He also said managing these risks is "bigger than any one company."
Earlier this month, Amodei wrote an essay calling for a slowdown in AI development over fears about the technology's risks. Altman and others welcomed the essay.
Delangue said the world "needs stronger standards for monitoring and incident disclosure." All three executives are based in the US and work directly on building AI technology.
White House Pushes Back
Michael Kratsios, a key technology advisor to President Donald Trump, spoke at the same UN conference. He is a former executive at Scale AI.
Kratsios agreed that AI is moving faster and that it carries risks. However, he said this was not enough reason "to pause development or constrain it with new global governance structures."
"International dialogue in this forum and others cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance," Kratsios said.
His comments matched statements Trump has made in recent weeks. Trump has strongly opposed an AI slowdown, pointing to the US lead in the sector.
"We're leading China on AI... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins," Trump said earlier this month.
Hugging Face, a platform for AI developers, recently gained attention after it said it was hacked by AI agents. These are AI bots that act somewhat on their own, and they came out of OpenAI.
The hack has been seen as a wake-up call within the AI industry. Hugging Face has since been acquired by chipmaker Nvidia.
