Leaders of top artificial intelligence firms, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, testified to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, urging nations to adopt international standards on the development of AI. This comes after AI agents at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have gone rogue in recent months, hacking into other companies’ corporate systems and, in the case of OpenAI, into the portal of Australia’s public health insurance program.
“I think we’re headed in the right direction,” says Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who has participated in several AI-related meetings on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week. “I do think that the CEOs, while there’s a bunch of reason to be cynical about them, are sincere that they think that the progress with this technology is moving too quickly and that they risk losing control of it, and that that could lead to permanent disempowerment or human extinction.”
