Rivals in Business, Allies at the UN: Altman and Amodei Urge the World to Set Common Rules for Artificial Intelligence
New York, September 23-24, 2026 — In a week when the UN General Assembly hosted one of the most heated debates yet on the future of artificial intelligence, two executives better known for their public rivalry than for consensus spoke, in practice, with one voice.
What happened
The UN Security Council, at the initiative of France, which holds the rotating presidency this month, held a special session Wednesday dedicated to the risks artificial intelligence poses to international security. Among those who addressed the Council were Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the company behind the Claude assistant); and Clément Delangue, co-founder of Hugging Face. Amodei spoke via video link rather than in person, while Altman was present in the chamber.
A shared message
Although the two companies compete directly at the frontier of AI development, and their leaders have criticized each other’s business models and philosophies in the past, before the Council they delivered essentially the same message: the industry needs international standards and cooperation among states, or it risks endangering global security.
Amodei was the more blunt of the two: if the world fails to coordinate its response to AI risks, he said, “AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” He put forward three concrete proposals:
- narrow, targeted international agreements — for example, a clear ban on using AI to develop biological weapons;
- mutual evaluation and verification systems, allowing states to confirm that their counterparts are honoring the commitments they’ve made;
- common standards for testing AI models, paired with a rapid notification mechanism for security incidents.
Altman focused on the legitimacy of decision-making. The most important choices about AI’s future, he said, cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone; they must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve. He also called for international AI standards, “accurate and speedy” incident reporting, and secure channels — both governmental and private — for sharing information about safety incidents as they arise.
The central image of his remarks was a crossroads: one path leads to a world where power is concentrated and decisions are opaque, where people feel that the most important technology of their lifetime is being done to them rather than for them; the other leads to a world where AI actually works for people.
The contrast with Washington
What gives the moment its weight is the contrast with the official U.S. position, voiced just one day earlier. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump told the General Assembly that the United States “rejects” any global attempt to control AI development, calling it a “globalist scheme of control.” He added, according to CNBC, that he would not “stifle the growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” and that the U.S. intends to keep its lead over China “very, very strong.”
The next day, two of the most influential executives in the American AI industry walked into the Security Council chamber to ask for exactly the kind of international oversight their own president had publicly rejected. It’s a gap that says something about the fracture within U.S. AI policy: the government regulating the technology and the companies building it are not, at this moment, speaking the same language.
What didn’t happen
For accuracy: neither Altman nor Amodei proposed binding rules or a concrete development limit during this session. Their appeal was for coordination and shared mechanisms, not a list of imposed measures. Amodei had called, in an essay published September 12, for slowing the pace of AI capability development and opening frontier labs to ongoing independent external evaluation — a call publicly backed by Altman and Elon Musk. No joint agreement on such a “speed limit” was announced at the UN, however.
On the other side of the geopolitical divide, China’s Foreign Ministry responded to the industry’s warnings by saying that alarmism and confrontation would disrupt, rather than help, global AI governance.
The takeaway
Wednesday’s session at the UN produced no agreement or treaty; instead, it laid bare a map of positions: America’s AI industry calling for international cooperation; its own president rejecting that cooperation as interference; China wary of the rhetoric of existential urgency. Whether Wednesday’s appeals turn into concrete mechanisms in the months ahead — or remain, as some commentators noted, a symbolic gesture without immediate institutional follow-through — remains to be seen.
Analysis produced with Claude (Anthropic), with editorial approval and oversight from Robert Williams. Readers are encouraged to consult additional sources; this piece does not represent the views of the parties quoted and should be read as journalistic reporting, not as a statement on their behalf.
Source: https://x.com/business/status/2102868521289961650?s=20
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