Twenty countries and the European Union have issued a call for international cooperation to ensure AI remains under human control, including the potential creation of a global oversight body to set and enforce standards. The countries, including Germany, South Africa, Canada, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, issued the joint statement on Monday as global leaders prepare to discuss the risks posed by rapidly advancing AI at the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly. The declaration, released by the office of Finnish President Alexander Stubb, calls on governments and industry to act immediately to ensure that AI is developed in line with international law and remains under “human direction, oversight and control”.
Signatories include German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Kenyan President William Ruto, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. The United States and China, the world’s two leading AI powers, did not join the statement, which remains “open for endorsement” by other countries. US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI when they meet at the White House on Thursday for their third face-to-face summit in less than a year.
Washington and Beijing, which are in a race to dominate cutting-edge technologies, have both rebuffed calls to slow down AI development to ensure greater safety. Other AI players not among the signatories include India, South Korea, Japan, the UK and France. The declaration comes as the AI sector is engaged in a heated debate about safety following calls for a slowdown in development by top industry leaders.
In an essay earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on firms to “slow the pace” of development to mitigate risks, a proposal that was swiftly endorsed by rivals including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Amodei’s call followed a series of cases of AI models engaging in unsanctioned malign activity, including an incident in July in which AI agents being tested by OpenAI hacked the AI start-up Hugging Face. In the latest intervention by industry on Monday, OpenAI said the US should lead an international effort to develop technical standards for advanced AI.
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