# Altman and Amodei Ask the Security Council for Standards

Times of AI Desk · 2026-09-23 · Policy

[https://timesof.ai/2026/09/altman-amodei-un-security-council](https://timesof.ai/2026/09/altman-amodei-un-security-council)

> Sam Altman and Dario Amodei briefed a French-chaired UN Security Council meeting on frontier AI. Altman said no catastrophic-risk percentage is acceptable and that OpenAI has slowed down before. No Council resolution was reported; Australia’s Medicare-portal disclosure landed the same day.

**Corrected October 14, 2026:** Removed the unsupported headline claim that the Council 'left with none' and an unverified claim about a standard; noted that Amodei spoke by video call, per the Guardian; attributed the slowdown remark to Altman alone; removed unverified framing about the CEOs' product week, the Australia disclosure detail, and a New York Times attribution.

Altman and Amodei used the Security Council to ask governments for standards; Altman added that OpenAI has slowed down unilaterally before and would again.

**September 23**, United Nations, New York: **OpenAI CEO Sam Altman** and **Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei** briefed the **Security Council** on frontier AI (Amodei by video call, according to the Guardian), in a meeting **France** convened during General Assembly week. **French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot** chaired, according to Reuters ahead of the session. **Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue** was also scheduled to brief. UN News described remarks from **Yoshua Bengio** on risks that no single country can contain.

This is not Amodei’s September 12 “Pace the Frontier” essay, and not the September 15 note that OpenAI’s Chris Lehane said safety talks with Anthropic and Google were under way. This is the Council session.

## What Altman said

About ten minutes in person (New York Times, Guardian, OpenAI’s posted remarks). He said recent progress had made AI’s “upside more tangible, but also the stakes and risks more immediate.” On catastrophe odds: “It doesn’t matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10 percent or 1 percent or 12 percent or 0.1 percent. None of these levels are remotely acceptable.” To the Guardian he framed the choice as “a new renaissance of creativity and discovery” or “a new industrial revolution of upheaval and disarray.” OpenAI’s posted text argues for a middle path and three principles: people stay at the center of decisions, systems remain under human control, and the technology should expand what individuals can do. He called for a mechanism of complementary national and international standards: measuring capabilities, assessing risks, judging whether safeguards are sufficient, and keeping meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. The Next Web reported a further line: “We have unilaterally slowed down in the past. We will do so in the future,” and “No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else.”

**Contrast**: a day earlier, **President Trump** told the General Assembly he condemned a “globalist scheme” to strangle and control AI and vowed not to rein the technology in.

## Same-day limit

This is a briefing, not a resolution. No Council text was adopted in the reporting used here.

## Sources

- [OpenAI: Sam Altman’s remarks at the United Nations Security Council (September 23, 2026)](https://openai.com/index/sam-altman-un-security-council-remarks/)
- [The New York Times: America’s A.I. Leaders Warn U.N. of Possible Peril (September 23, 2026)](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/politics/ai-leaders-united-nations-global-response.html)
- [The Guardian: Altman and Amodei address the UN Security Council (September 23, 2026)](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/23/unga-sam-altman-dario-amodei)
- [UN News: Security Council briefed on runaway AI (September 23, 2026)](https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168414)
- [Reuters, via the Jerusalem Post account of the pre-brief (September 23, 2026)](https://www.jpost.com/international/article-909426)