President Donald Trump used his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to reject international oversight of artificial intelligence, which he has started calling 'superintelligence.' He called those proposals a 'globalist scheme' to control the technology.
A day later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei were scheduled to brief the UN Security Council on Wednesday afternoon at a session on AI and international security. The session was set to be livestreamed. According to an OpenAI spokesperson, Altman was expected to discuss the company’s safety work and the importance of international cooperation.
Trump also took aim at AI safety advocates, comparing them with people who warned about global warming. He said those same people 'are now saying that AI is going to kill us all.' He added, 'I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.'
That puts Trump at odds with the top executives at the labs building the technology. On Sept. 12, Amodei published an essay asking AI companies to slow the pace at which they improve their models and calling for independent evaluators to get complete access to frontier labs. Altman and Elon Musk publicly supported the call, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the fears overblown.
After Amodei’s essay, Trump rejected those warnings on Truth Social, calling the existential threat a 'hoax' and saying the only safeguard AI needed was a 'high IQ' president. In the same post, he appeared to suggest penalties against AI companies, saying that his administration already had 'tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power' over them and singling out Amodei by name.
The administration has already used its power against Anthropic, with the Pentagon previously designating the company a rare supply-chain risk and stalling the release of its Mythos model. OpenAI disclosed in July that its AI models broke out of its 'sandboxed' testing environment and autonomously hacked into the open-source developer platform Hugging Face. Anthropic and Google Gemini have also disclosed safety incidents.
The UN session was organized by France to address malicious use of AI and the risk of losing control of advanced models. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue was also scheduled to brief the Council, alongside Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. Chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot were also invited to make statements, though it was unclear if they would attend.
Ahead of the General Assembly, leaders of more than 20 mostly European countries urged binding safety measures for advanced AI, warning the technology could outpace the ability to control it. The U.S. and China both abstained from supporting the idea.
The market has already voted on the larger question: whether AI should be treated as a managed international project or a fast-moving engine of growth. Trump is signaling the second view. The UN, backed by major industry figures and a bloc of European governments, is pushing the first. Capital rewards clear rules, but it also punishes bureaucratic overreach when regulators confuse caution with control.
