3 AI Leaders Ask UN for Global Standards; US Says No

The heads of three major artificial intelligence companies asked the United Nations on Wednesday to help build common international standards for evaluating AI risk, and a senior Trump administration technology adviser told the same UN gathering the U.S. would not support new global governance structures for the technology, according to BBC News.

What did OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face ask the UN to do?

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face chief executive Clement Delangue each addressed the UN this week, calling for coordinated international rules on AI development, BBC News reported. Altman framed the request around accountability rather than control by any single company. "If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone," Altman told the UN, according to the outlet. He said he wanted countries "working together toward the collective good in the face of powerful new technology."

What specific standards did Sam Altman propose?

Altman's request was concrete rather than aspirational. He called for "national and international" standards covering four areas: measuring the capabilities of an AI tool, assessing the risks tied to those capabilities, defining safeguards, and setting the degree of human oversight that must be maintained over AI systems, per BBC News. He also asked for "speedy incident reporting, classification, and reporting protocols so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes." The stated goal, in Altman's words, was to let "countries compare evidence, verify compliance, and have a shared language and understanding [of] what is happening."

What did Amodei and Delangue say about slowing AI development?

Amodei's UN remarks followed an essay he published earlier this month that Altman and others welcomed, according to BBC News, in which Amodei argued for a slowdown in AI development tied to safety concerns. At the UN, Amodei said AI "if managed poorly... could be a risk to humanity as a whole" and that continued development "calls for even more stringent standards of safety." He committed Anthropic to a specific pace-setting standard: "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, per the outlet. He added that the risk "is ultimately bigger than any one company, and it has an industry-wide and global scale." Delangue made similar comments, according to BBC News, though the outlet's report of his remarks was cut short in the material reviewed.

How did the Trump administration respond at the UN?

Michael Kratsios, a technology adviser to President Trump and a former Scale AI executive, rejected the companies' request for new AI governance at the same conference, BBC News reported. Kratsios acknowledged that AI development is accelerating and that the technology carries risk, but said that was not sufficient reason "to pause development or constrain it with new global governance structures." He drew a specific line against using the UN forum to build binding international rules: "International dialogue in this forum and others cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance," Kratsios said, according to the outlet.

Key dates and figures

• Three chief executives — Altman (OpenAI), Amodei (Anthropic), Delangue (Hugging Face) — addressed the UN on the same day, September 23, 2026, per BBC News.
• Amodei's slowdown essay was published earlier in September 2026, ahead of his UN remarks, according to the outlet.

Does this reflect Trump's broader position on AI competition?

Kratsios's comments tracked statements Trump made in the same period, BBC News reported. Trump told the UN on Tuesday he wanted to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," and has opposed any AI slowdown on competitive grounds. "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, according to the outlet. That framing — AI development as a race with China rather than a shared risk to manage jointly — is the backdrop against which Kratsios rejected the companies' standards proposal.

What happens next for global AI oversight?

BBC News did not report any scheduled follow-up UN session or binding mechanism resulting from the exchange. The companies' request remains a proposal without an adopted framework, and the U.S. position, as stated by Kratsios, forecloses UN-brokered governance structures for now. The gap between the two positions — company-level calls for shared risk-evaluation standards and incident-reporting protocols versus a U.S. government stance against new global structures — was left unresolved in the reporting reviewed.

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