OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman briefs the UN Security Council in New York on 23 September 2026. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías Sam Altman is calling for national and international standards for frontier AI. Speaking at the UN Security Council in New York today, the OpenAI chief executive says no level of catastrophic risk from AI is acceptable. Altman is the second briefer at the meeting, which France convened.
According to the Security Council Report, it is the Council’s first meeting focused specifically on the safety risks of increasingly capable AI. It comes two months after OpenAI’s own agents broke into Hugging Face during an internal test. “We’ve been talking about artificial intelligence for years, but it feels different in recent weeks and months,” Altman says. He says he largely agrees with Yoshua Bengio, who spoke before him. However, he sees two main dangers rather than three: losing control of the future to AI, and AI concentrating power in too few hands.
Being in a competitive race, he adds, is no reason to make rash decisions. “We have unilaterally slowed down in the past. We will do so in the future,” he says. No level of catastrophic risk is acceptable, Altman argues, whether people put it at 10% or 0.1%. Companies should not train models unless they can make a strong case that those models will stay under human control. “No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else,” he tells the Council.
Altman also points to OpenAI’s claim this month that one of its models solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, a result that has not yet been independently verified. “If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone,” Altman says. His proposals follow a standards proposal OpenAI published on Tuesday. He wants common standards for testing capabilities, assessing risks and keeping human oversight, so that countries can compare evidence and verify compliance. He also calls for rapid incident reporting and secure channels among governments, infrastructure operators, and technical experts.
The standards, he says, should not lock in incumbents and should support both open and closed model developers. “AI can either be more like a new renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray,” he says. “We might be the builders, one of the builders of this technology, but we are not the heroes of the story,” Altman adds. Also tagged with
