OpenAI CEO Altman to brief UN Security Council on AI safety risks

OpenAI published a proposal on Monday urging the United States to spearhead an international effort to develop global safety and technical standards for advanced AI, warning that inaction could leave the country watching "a fragmented, uneven, and conflict-ridden system take hold around it."thenextweb+1

The proposal, which focuses on frontier AI models and recursive self-improvement — a process in which AI systems take on increasing responsibility for developing their own successors — arrives during a week of heightened AI diplomacy at the United Nations and between Washington and Beijing.

Standards, Not Licenses

OpenAI's plan calls for common frameworks to measure AI capabilities, assess how much autonomous research is happening inside AI companies, and establish shared incident-reporting protocols with common severity levels. The company proposed routing the effort through the U.S. Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the growing network of national AI safety institutes in countries including the UK, Japan, France, and Canada.dig+1

The company stressed the standards "would not be licenses, mandatory prerelease review, or approval requirements for AI models," leaving individual governments to decide how to incorporate them into domestic law. OpenAI also called for secure communication channels between governments and critical infrastructure operators to share emerging threats, and said dialogue between the United States and China "would be a positive step."thenextweb+2

"Fully autonomous RSI is not happening today, and we should not pursue it unless and until it can be done safely," the company wrote.thenextweb

A Crowded Week for AI Diplomacy

The proposal landed amid a flurry of activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said over the weekend that the U.S. and China had agreed to create a bilateral AI dialogue, and Washington proposed an AI incident notification mechanism to Beijing. On Monday, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he favors a light touch on AI regulation, adding, "Whoever wins AI, WINS!" Bessent separately said the administration would not grant frontier AI labs protection from liability.foxbaltimore+1

On Tuesday, at the UN General Assembly, Secretary-General António Guterres warned of AI's dangers and called for global cooperation. Trump, speaking shortly after, dismissed the idea as a "globalist scheme" and said the U.S. was renaming AI "super intelligence," according to Bloomberg.thenextweb

Altman Heads to the Security Council

Sam Altman is set to brief the UN Security Council on Wednesday afternoon alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, AI researcher Yoshua Bengio, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue — the council's first session focused on the safety risks of increasingly capable AI. OpenAI representatives said Altman would position himself as a "pragmatic centrist," promoting shared safety standards without concentrating power in a few companies.thenextweb

Later this week, Altman will attend a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping, underscoring how central AI has become to U.S.-China relations.foxbaltimore+1