WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The UN Security Council has been briefed by some of the world's top AI executives on the huge benefits and huge risks the frontier technology presents.
The leaders of several major tech companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face, addressed the Security Council Wednesday on recent developments surrounding AI and spotlighted both the potential and the problems inherent in the emerging technology. Council members differed over how the international community should respond when international security is implicated.
Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer of Anthropic, said that the rapid pace of AI progress will produce 'incredible benefit for the world'; however, 'these remarkable capabilities come with risks that must be managed.'
Pointing to two main risks of global scope and concern - the misuse of AI models and the loss of control over them - he said that they are grave enough that they are important questions for the Security Council. 'If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.'
For its part, he said that Anthropic 'will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive technology that we release is actually safe'. However, he observed that 'regardless of what we do, managing these risks is ultimately bigger than any one company'.
He offered three suggestions for the Council, including creating 'narrow' agreements that every Member State can support, such as a ban on using AI to make biological weapons. Additionally, he suggested that the organ could work to build evaluation systems that keep pace with AI development and establish common global standards for testing AI models for the risks of loss of control and misuse.
Clément Delangue, Chief Executive Officer of Hugging Face, recalled that his was the 'first company to publicly disclose an autonomous agent cyberattack to the world', earlier in 2026.
Offering lessons from that incident, he said, 'We can all agree that we need more transparency in AI.' Specifically, the international community needs stronger standards for monitoring and disclosing incidents'.
He also said that the 'biggest risk' is not powerful AI - it is the 'asymmetry of powerful AI'. This asymmetry includes that between attackers and defenders, between a few companies and 'everyone else' and between a few countries and the rest of the world, he said, spotlighting in particular the 'asymmetry of power'. As such, open-source models are important tools.
The incident also taught his company how AI can stoke fear among the public - especially through 'anthropomorphic framing and sci-fi imagery', he said. 'We strongly believe that fear-based narratives are not the way to make the right decisions about the future of such a foundational and empowering technology.'
'We were attacked by AI but, more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI,' he added.
'We have a choice in front of us,' said Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, stating that the technology can either be 'a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery' or 'a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray'.
He observed: 'Some of the things people working to build AI have said are so dystopian that they sound like the plot of bad science-fiction movies'. Anything powerful is also intimidating, and he acknowledged that, as AI systems become more capable and autonomous, 'they can move faster than our institutions, concentrate power in too few hands or make decisions that people no longer understand or control'.
'This moment calls for extreme care,' he said, adding that 'the industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great'.
He said his company is placing people at the centre of AI decision-making.
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