Anthropic, OpenAI CEOs warn AI could threaten humanity without safeguards

The CEOs of two of the world's leading AI companies warned the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday that rapidly advancing AI could threaten humanity if governments and industry fail to keep it under human control.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI has enormous potential but also carries significant risks if it is not developed responsibly.

"If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," Amodei told the 15-member council during a special meeting on AI held alongside the U.N. General Assembly.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a similar warning, saying AI's development could move "so fast" that humans no longer have the ability to understand or intervene.

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"We could lose control of the future to AI," Altman said. "The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible."

The meeting comes as concerns grow over increasingly advanced AI systems.

"For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time," Amodei said. "No leader, no company and no nation can manage this alone."

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Altman also urged countries to work together on AI as the technology continues to advance.

"If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone," he said. "They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments, accountable to the people that they serve. At the international level, this will require cooperation."

He added, "In our history, there have been times where countries who compete and don't always like each other very much still come together for shared interests and the collective good in the face of a powerful new technology. We believe this must be one of those times."

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The debate over how to develop and govern AI has intensified in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, Amodei published an essay urging the industry to "slow the pace" of frontier AI development. The essay drew public support from Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

The discussion at the U.N. also came a day after President Donald Trump said the U.S. would reject what he described as a "globalist scheme" to control AI, while emphasizing that the U.S. should remain the global leader in the technology.

French Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pascal Confavreux told Fox News Digital in an interview that France is seeking to bring artificial intelligence to the center of international security discussions, with a special UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday featuring executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face.

"For a few weeks now, we wanted to bring AI at the center stage," Confavreux said, explaining that the meeting was the first of its kind to feature briefers at this level from leading AI companies.

He said recent cybersecurity concerns, including a reported hacking incident involving Hugging Face, underscore the need to address AI-related security risks at the international level.

"We need to bring that into the discussions of the global community," he said.

The meeting was chaired by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, alongside the Security Council's 14 other members.

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Confavreux also highlighted a separate meeting led by French President Emmanuel Macron focused on protecting young people from the risks associated with AI and the digital age.

"AI is a fantastic accelerator for many things in our daily lives," he said, adding that protecting young people in the digital age must be addressed globally rather than solely at the national level

FOX Business' Eric Revell and Reuters contributed to this report.