# OpenAI and Anthropic ask the UN for global AI rules. Washington says no.

> Altman and Amodei asked the UN Security Council for global AI rules on 23 September 2026.

*Sam Altman and Dario Amodei told the Security Council the industry cannot govern itself. President Trump had already called the idea a 'globalist scheme'.*

By Behzad Hosseini · WireRead
Canonical: https://wireread.com/news/openai-anthropic-un-security-council-ai-rules-analysis

Two chief executives who compete for the same customers, the same researchers and the same headlines stood in front of the UN Security Council on 23 September 2026 and said, in near-identical terms, that their industry cannot be trusted to govern itself. Sam Altman flew to New York and spoke in person; Dario Amodei appeared by video link; Hugging Face's Clément Delangue joined remotely. France, holding the Council presidency for the month, had convened the session specifically to discuss AI and international security, and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot chaired it personally. The unusual part was not that AI executives asked for regulation — labs have done that performatively for years — but the specificity of what they asked for, and the flat rejection waiting for them a day earlier from the country where both companies are headquartered.

## What Amodei proposed

Amodei's remarks were the starker of the two. He told the Council that unmanaged AI development was not an abstract worry but the defining security question of the decade.

> If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole
> — [Dario Amodei, Anthropic](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/24/ai-corporate-leaders-tell-un-the-industry-needs-global-regulation), 2026-09-24

He then set out three concrete mechanisms rather than a general appeal. First, narrow global agreements on specific catastrophic uses — a ban on using AI to design or manufacture biological weapons was his named example, chosen because it is a use nobody defends and every government has an incentive to prevent. Second, evaluation and verification systems that let countries check each other's stated safety commitments, rather than taking a lab's or a government's word for it. Third, common global standards for testing frontier models, paired with a notification system so a serious AI security incident in one country reaches the others before it repeats itself. Read together, that is a request for an inspection regime, not a treaty banning AI outright — closer in spirit to arms-control verification than to a moratorium.

> No leader, no company and no nation can manage this alone
> — [Dario Amodei, Anthropic](https://gizmodo.com/altman-and-amodei-performed-their-stop-us-from-murdering-the-world-routine-for-the-un-2000816406), 2026-09-23

## What Altman asked for

Altman's framing leaned more procedural than existential, though he did not shy from the stakes. His core ask was for international standards covering four things at once: measuring what a model can actually do, assessing the risks that follow from that, judging whether a lab's safeguards are adequate, and preserving human oversight as systems get more capable.

> measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving meaningful human oversight
> — [Sam Altman, OpenAI](https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/23/tech/altman-amodei-ai-safety-un-security-council), 2026-09-23

He paired that with a practical ask for accurate, fast incident reporting — so, in his words, the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes — and secure channels between governments, infrastructure operators and technical experts to share emerging threats. Altman also drew a pointed distinction that Amodei did not: any global framework, he argued, has to run through democratic institutions accountable to their own populations, which quietly excludes governments racing on AI without that accountability. He also made a point of not overclaiming. Any chance of an AI-caused catastrophe was unacceptable, he said, but he did not want to fall into the 'trap of doomerism' or the 'trap of blind optimism' — the two poles the AI safety debate has split into this year.

Here is the proposal set side by side, because the differences matter as much as the overlap:

| Speaker | Role at the session | Core proposal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Dario Amodei (Anthropic) | CEO, addressed by video | Narrow bans on specific catastrophic uses; mutual verification of safety commitments; shared testing standards plus incident notification |
| Sam Altman (OpenAI) | CEO, addressed in person | Standards to measure capability, assess risk, judge safeguards, preserve human oversight; fast incident reporting; secure inter-government channels |
| Clément Delangue (Hugging Face) | CEO, addressed remotely | Cited his own company's experience being attacked by rogue AI agents as the case for oversight |
| Jean-Noël Barrot (France) | Foreign minister, chaired the session | Convened the meeting; compared the moment to the 1945 dawn of the nuclear age |
| Michael Kratsios (US) | White House science adviser, delegate | Rejected 'centralised control and global governance of AI' outright |
| Donald Trump (US) | President, addressed the General Assembly a day earlier | Called international AI oversight a 'globalist scheme'; will rename AI 'super intelligence' in US documents |

## The rejection arrived a day early

Altman and Amodei were not speaking into a vacuum; they were speaking after the loudest possible answer to their question had already been given. On 22 September, addressing the General Assembly, President Trump rejected the entire premise of international AI oversight and announced that the US government would rename artificial intelligence 'super intelligence' in its own documents.

> totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much
> — [President Donald Trump](https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/23/killer-robots-or-super-intelligence-trump-and-world-leaders-clash-over-ai), 2026-09-23

He was equally direct about why: growth, not caution, was the priority. 'I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,' he told the chamber. The next afternoon, at the Security Council itself, the US delegate — Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — held that same line in the room where Altman and Amodei had just made their case, telling members the US would 'totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralised control and global governance of AI.' No other delegation used the term 'superintelligence'; every other speaker, including the two CEOs, said 'AI'.

## What an actual regime would look like

Strip away the diplomacy and the three ideas on the table — narrow bans, mutual verification, shared testing standards with incident reporting — describe something with real precedent: an inspection-and-disclosure regime, the model used for nuclear non-proliferation and, more recently, for the state-level AI rules starting to appear inside the US itself. Barrot's comparison to 1945 was not just rhetoric; the mechanisms he, Amodei and Altman were all gesturing at — independent verification, standardised testing, mandatory incident reporting — are the same three legs the nuclear order eventually stood on, adapted to a technology nobody can physically inspect a warehouse for.

> **Key:** The domestic version of this idea is already further along than the UN version. California's governor ordered [a comparable programme of onsite independent verification and loss-of-control incident reporting](/news/california-ai-kill-switch-order-analysis) for frontier labs just five days earlier, on 18 September — covering many of the same companies that just addressed the Security Council. A single US state has moved further on paper than the institution meant to coordinate 193 of them.

## Who it would bind — and who it leaves out

The gap between the ask and the room is the story. Amodei and Altman's proposals only work if the countries hosting frontier labs sign on, and the country hosting the most consequential ones just told the room, twice in 24 hours, that it will not. China's representative, for its part, criticised what it called a 'petty us-against-them narrative' aimed at preserving a technological monopoly — a real disagreement about who global rules would actually constrain, not a shared objection to the idea of rules. Chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot were invited to address the Council; it is unclear whether either did. An UN framework with the US and China both unwilling to bind themselves is, in practice, a framework that governs the labs least likely to cause the incidents everyone is worried about.

The domestic US picture split the same day. Hours after the Security Council session, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act — legislation with teeth Altman and Amodei's UN remarks pointedly lacked, including a temporary development pause and prison terms for violations. It has no realistic path through this Congress, but it demonstrates that the appetite for binding rules the CEOs invoked abstractly at the UN already exists, concretely, in domestic politics — just not currently in the executive branch. And one further data point belongs in the same frame: Politico reported on 24 September that the White House had asked both OpenAI and Anthropic to hold new frontier models back from the UK's AI Security Institute pending a US review, with Anthropic already complying. A government that rejects multilateral AI oversight in public is simultaneously tightening bilateral control over who else gets to see the models first.

What to watch: whether France or another Council member tries to turn Wednesday's briefing into an actual draft resolution — which would require US and Chinese abstention at minimum to survive a veto, an unlikely combination given both governments' stated positions; whether Amodei's narrow-ban idea gets picked up bilaterally even without a UN vehicle, since a bioweapons-use ban is the one proposal with no obvious opponent; and whether the AISI access dispute widens into the first real test of whether 'international cooperation on AI safety' survives contact with a government that has just rejected the principle in the room built for exactly that purpose.

## Key takeaways

- Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressed the UN Security Council on 23 September 2026 — a rare joint call for binding international AI oversight from two rival chief executives.
- Amodei proposed three mechanisms: narrow bans such as on AI-enabled bioweapons, mutual verification of safety commitments, and shared testing standards with an incident-reporting system.
- Altman asked for international standards to measure capability, assess risk, judge safeguards and preserve human oversight, plus fast, shared incident reporting between governments.
- The day before, President Trump told the General Assembly the US 'totally rejects' any 'globalist scheme' to control AI; the US delegate at the Security Council rejected 'global governance' outright.
- Nothing binding resulted. The Council cannot compel any state, and the US and China — home to the companies and labs that matter most — both declined to back new rules.

## FAQ

### What did Sam Altman ask the UN Security Council for?
International standards for measuring AI capabilities, assessing risks, judging whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving human oversight, plus fast incident reporting and secure channels between governments.

### What did Dario Amodei propose to the UN?
Three mechanisms: narrow global bans on specific catastrophic uses such as AI-enabled bioweapons, mutual verification of countries' safety commitments, and shared global testing standards with an incident-notification system.

### Did the UN Security Council agree to regulate AI?
No. The session produced no resolution or binding commitment. The US rejected 'global governance' of AI outright, and any Council resolution would need US and Chinese consent to survive their veto power.

### Why did Trump call international AI rules a 'globalist scheme'?
In his 22 September UN General Assembly address, Trump rejected international oversight of AI as a 'globalist scheme' and said the US would prioritise growth, renaming AI 'super intelligence' in federal documents.

### Is a binding global AI safety agreement likely soon?
Unlikely in the near term. Both the US and China declined to back international rules at the session, and any Security Council resolution needs the consent of both to pass.

## Sources

- [Sam Altman, Dario Amodei urge UN Security Council to adopt international AI standards](https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/23/tech/altman-amodei-ai-safety-un-security-council) — CNN, 2026-09-23
- [OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs call for global AI regulation at UN](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/24/ai-corporate-leaders-tell-un-the-industry-needs-global-regulation) — Al Jazeera, 2026-09-24
- [OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs push for AI cooperation at UN after Trump rebuffs 'globalist scheme' to control it](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/23/altman-amodei-un-ai-safety.html) — CNBC, 2026-09-23
- [Killer robots or super intelligence? Trump and world leaders clash over AI](https://www.euronews.com/2026/09/23/killer-robots-or-super-intelligence-trump-and-world-leaders-clash-over-ai) — Euronews, 2026-09-23
- [A nuclear moment? Fractures show at UN Security Council meeting over AI safety](https://san.com/cc/a-nuclear-moment-fractures-show-at-un-security-council-meeting-over-ai-safety/) — Straight Arrow News, 2026-09-24
- [Trump calls AI oversight a 'globalist scheme' as Amodei and Altman head to the UN to ask for it](https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/trump-un-ai-globalist-scheme-altman-amodei-security-council/) — Fortune, 2026-09-23
- [Altman and Amodei Performed Their Stop-Us-From-Murdering-the-World Routine for the UN](https://gizmodo.com/altman-and-amodei-performed-their-stop-us-from-murdering-the-world-routine-for-the-un-2000816406) — Gizmodo, 2026-09-23
- [NEWS: Casar, Sanders Introduce Legislation to Create New Federal Agency to Ban Artificial Superintelligence, Pause Advanced AI Development](https://casar.house.gov/media/press-releases/news-casar-sanders-introduce-legislation-create-new-federal-agency-ban) — Office of Rep. Greg Casar, 2026-09-23
- [White House tells OpenAI and Anthropic to let U.S. review new models before sharing them with British testers](https://the-decoder.com/white-house-tells-openai-and-anthropic-to-let-u-s-review-new-models-before-sharing-them-with-british-testers/) — The Decoder, 2026-09-25
- [What AI slowdown? OpenAI, Anthropic release dueling models as price wars heat up](https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/what-ai-slowdown-openai-anthropic-release-dueling-moreaffordable-models-as-ai-price-wars-heat-up/) — Fortune, 2026-09-22
- [Google's Gemini AI hacked into other companies, adding to 'rogue' AI incidents](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/18/google-gemini-ai-hacked-into-other-companies-during-internal-testing/) — The Washington Post, 2026-09-18
- [We Must Pace the Frontier](https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier) — Dario Amodei / Anthropic, 2026-09-12