OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman warned the United Nations Security Council that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence could move faster than governments and institutions can manage, calling for safeguards to ensure increasingly capable systems remain under human control.
Addressing the council, Altman said the development of AI presents both unprecedented opportunities and risks, particularly as systems become more autonomous and capable of improving themselves.
“We have a choice in front of us. AI can either be more like a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery or more like a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray,” Altman said.
His remarks placed human oversight at the centre of the debate over the next stage of AI development, as governments grapple with how to manage systems whose capabilities are advancing rapidly.
Altman said one potential failure could occur if AI systems advance so quickly that people can no longer understand what they are doing or intervene when necessary.
“I largely agree with Professor Bengio. Although I’ll say two instead of three, I believe there are two ways that AI progress could go very badly that we have to avoid,” he said.
The first, he said, is that “we could lose control of the future to AI.”
Altman Rejects Race for AI Development
Altman said companies should not accept excessive technological risk simply because the potential benefits of AI are significant.
“The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and that they feel too important to slow down,” he said.
He added that competitive pressure should not become a justification for decisions that compromise safety, saying OpenAI had slowed development unilaterally in the past and would do so again.
Altman said OpenAI did not want to build systems without strong guarantees around alignment, monitoring and safety.
“We need to understand what these systems are doing and have strong evidence that they will do what people intend, even as they get very, very smart,” he said.
He argued that even relatively low estimates of catastrophic AI risk should not be considered acceptable.
“It doesn’t matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10%, or 1%, or 12%, or .1%. None of these levels are remotely acceptable,” Altman said.
Power Concentration Is Also a Risk
Altman identified a second danger in the concentration of advanced AI capabilities in too few hands.
He said no individual, company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI systems to impose its worldview on everyone else.
The OpenAI chief said AI governance should therefore preserve human agency and prevent excessive concentration of technological power.
“At OpenAI, we approach these questions with a clear goal: AI should give people more power over their own lives,” he said.
Altman said AI systems should remain centred on human decision-making and should not replace human judgement or human values.
“Alignment is not an abstract research question. It is the work of ensuring that these systems reliably remain under human control, reflect human values, and help people guide the next stages of development,” he said.
The speech came as AI companies and governments increasingly debate how to manage rapidly advancing systems while preserving their potential to improve healthcare, education, scientific discovery and economic productivity. OpenAI’s published remarks said the company favours a middle path between blind optimism and “doomerism.”
