The United Nations Security Council is the 15-member organ of the United Nations charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Its presidency rotates monthly among members. In September 2026, under the French presidency, it held an open meeting on artificial intelligence and international security at which heads of frontier AI developers briefed the Council.
September 2026 meeting on AI and international security
France convened the meeting for September 23, 2026, with French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot in the chair. France's concept note, circulated to Council members, said it "wishes to underline the urgency of action to foster safe and responsible development of artificial intelligence," and framed the session around risks "linked to loss of control or the use of the latest AI models" (Source: reuters.com). A European diplomat said the meeting aimed to highlight the practical risks of AI losing control in ways that affect international security (Source: reuters.com).
The scheduled briefers were OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue and Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. An OpenAI executive told reporters on September 22 that Altman planned to urge world leaders to adopt benchmarks for measuring AI capabilities and assessing companies' safeguards (Source: reuters.com). DeepSeek and other Chinese firms including Moonshot AI were invited to make statements, two people familiar with the matter said on September 22; DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng did not plan to attend (Source: reuters.com).
The meeting took place during the UN General Assembly's high-level week. On September 22, President Donald Trump told the General Assembly that the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control" artificial intelligence (Source: theverge.com). Two days before the meeting, OpenAI published a proposal for internationally coordinated technical standards for frontier AI (Building Standards for the Next Phase of AI (OpenAI, September 2026)), and Altman's Council appearance was noted in coverage of it (Source: axios.com).
Two days before the meeting, on September 21, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb launched "A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models," asking UN member states to explore an international institution able to set standards, enable verification and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed; France's President Emmanuel Macron endorsed it on September 23, the day of the meeting (A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models (joint statement, September 2026)). The Wall Street Journal reported that Macron's government had called on the Council to focus on AI and security ahead of the General Assembly (Source: wsj.com).
At the meeting on September 23, Altman and Amodei each stressed global cooperation on standards to address the possibility that AI systems gain the ability to improve on their own and outpace human control, and each said governments should join industry in making decisions about the technology's future, according to Bloomberg's account; only that account's summary paragraphs were available (Source: bloomberg.com). OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, in a Council appearance whose coverage became public on September 24, told members the United States is committed to responsible AI development while shunning restrictive regulation, promoted the administration's AI exports program, and said the rapid advance of the frontier "is not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structures"; only the lede of that coverage was retrieved (Source: insideaipolicy.com).
Relationships
- related: Independent International Scientific Panel on AI
- related: Global Dialogue on AI Governance
- related: Sam Altman
- related: Dario Amodei
- related: Clément Delangue
- related: Yoshua Bengio
- related: A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models (2026) — the Norway–Finland statement launched two days before the meeting.