Tech leaders to UN: for the sake of humanity, please control the AI technology we created

The heads of major artificial intelligence firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people – by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.”

Both said the countries of the world, through the UN Security Council, where they testified on Wednesday, have to set safeguards of some kind to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to rein in.

They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI is not concentrated in one company or country. They also touted the benefits of the technology for bettering humanity and what Altman called “giving people more power over their own lives”.