For humanity's sake, please control the AI we created: Tech leaders urge UN

The US and China are jostling for AI dominance - and Chinese UN Ambassador Fu Cong emphasised that all countries should be able to choose AI technology as they see fit | Image: Bloomberg

The heads of major artificial intelligence firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people - by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing.

"If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came the assessment: "We could lose control of the future to AI." Both said the countries of the world, through the UN Security Council, where they testified Wednesday, have to set safeguards of some kind to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to rein in.

They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI isn't concentrated in one company or country. They also touted the benefits of the technology for bettering humanity and what Altman called "giving people more power over their own lives." Those tech leaders "are telling us in stark terms that it cannot be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world," British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said at the Security Council. "We cannot ignore them because they are right.'' AI will be at the heart of G20 discussions Miliband said when the UK leads the G20 next year, it will put controlling AI at the heart of discussions, looking for a single set of global standards "to insure that AI development is safe." But, the United States said: Don't do it.

Worries about control of AI are "not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure," said White House Science Adviser Michael Kratsios.