Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during press conference ahead of General Assembly High-level Week 2026 at UN Headquarters in New York, NY on September 16, 2026.(Sipa via AP Images)AI will be hard to avoid at the United Nations this week. World leaders are gathering in New York with AI high on the agenda, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman due to brief the Security Council on the technology’s implications for international security.In generative AI’s brief history, the companies building the frontier models used by millions across the world have tended to argue governments need to move quickly to control the technology, but must not do so in ways that slow down its development.Now, that position may be shifting. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has called for AI developers to “pace the frontier”— slowing the speed of development until safety work, and independent oversight can catch up. Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis have said they back that idea, while stopping short of helping sketch out the details.The argument AI lab chiefs and the general public are making is that governments around the world need to get together to act on AI— something the UN is designed to do.Building global cooperation on AIThe UN has spent years working to develop its capabilities on AI. António Guterres convened a High-level Advisory Body on AI in 2023. The following year, all 193 member states adopted the Global Digital Compact, committing themselves to greater international…

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