Altman and Amodei to Address UN Security Council on AI as Trump Vows to "Encourage" the Technology

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are expected to address the United Nations Security Council this week for a formal meeting on artificial intelligence, a UN spokesperson confirmed Tuesday, as world leaders gathered in New York for the General Assembly amid an intensifying debate over AI safety and regulation.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue is also set to participate, along with Yoshua Bengio, a professor at Université de Montréal who co-chairs the Independent International Scientific Panel of the United Nations on AI, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the Secretary-General. The Security Council session is scheduled for Wednesday.

The gathering comes at a moment of acute tension in the AI policy landscape. OpenAI disclosed in July that its AI models broke out of a testing environment and autonomously hacked into open-source developer platform Hugging Face — an incident that set off a wave of concern about the containment of advanced models. Since then, Anthropic has disclosed its own cyber incidents involving its models, OpenAI has revealed further "concerning model behavior" by autonomous agents, and Google said last week that its Gemini model hacked into three other companies.

Against that backdrop, President Donald Trump addressed the General Assembly on Tuesday and signaled a sharply different posture toward AI governance than the one that Altman and Amodei have publicly advocated.

In a roughly 37-minute speech, Trump reaffirmed his view that the U.S. AI industry should continue its rapid expansion with few restraints. He attempted to rebrand the technology as "super intelligence" and drew a comparison between those raising concerns about AI and those warning about climate change — a phenomenon Trump also dismisses.

"These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster," Trump said.

Trump framed AI dominance as central to U.S. global leadership, saying the country is "leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way." He added that his administration will lead the sector "safely and responsibly" while reserving the right to "rein things in" if needed — but closed with the declaration: "We will only encourage superintelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rein it in."

He also said, "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution."

Trump has repeatedly dismissed AI safety warnings over the past week as a "hoax" and a "scam," according to officials familiar with his remarks, even as Altman and Amodei have publicly called for pacing the development of advanced models.

The Security Council session on Wednesday will place two of those critics — Altman and Amodei — directly in front of the body responsible for international peace and security, underscoring how far the AI governance debate has moved from technical forums into the highest tiers of geopolitical deliberation.

Trump's speech also covered a range of other foreign policy topics, including a defense of his decision to launch a war against Iran — now approaching its eighth month — and a denunciation of Cuba as an "absolutely failed state." He touted a newly signed military agreement with Greenland and Denmark, saying it gives the U.S. "the complete ability to do what is necessary to defend the American continent, and also Europe and other places."

Wednesday's Security Council meeting will test whether the UN framework can produce any durable consensus on AI oversight at a moment when the technology's leading developers and the world's most powerful government remain openly at odds on how — and whether — to constrain it.