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More than 20 countries have signed a joint statement calling for binding safety rules on advanced artificial intelligence, with the United States and China both sitting it out.
Getting into it: The declaration was released Monday by the office of Finnish President Alexander Stubb, ahead of this week’s UN General Assembly gathering in New York, where AI is set to be one of the big topics. Finland, Norway, Canada, Germany, Australia, Kenya, South Africa, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, Kazakhstan, and the United Arab Emirates all signed on, joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. The statement remains open for other countries to sign, though several major AI players, including the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, and India, have not.
The joint statement says, “AI must remain under human direction, oversight and control. It must be developed and used in line with international law. To realize AI’s potential, industry, governments and society must act now. We must address these risks and strengthen oversight – without widening the gap between countries in access to the benefits of AI.”
The leaders stopped short of calling for development to halt, but urged companies to publish clear safety protocols backed by required testing and outside review, governments to build common standards and flag serious safety incidents to one another, and the UN to look at creating an international body that could set standards, verify compliance, and pull countries together when AI systems cross certain capability thresholds.
The statement points to scenarios where AI has bypassed the checks meant to test it and broken into outside systems it wasn’t supposed to reach, including the July breach of Hugging Face by AI agents OpenAI was testing. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who said his country helped put the statement together, told reporters in New York that Australians “do want to know that artificial intelligence won’t be in control of us.”
This all comes as the US has indicated it wants no part of slowing the industry down, with President Donald Trump saying Saturday he would not allow the “destruction” of AI, calling safety concerns a hoax, and writing Monday that the country is ahead of China and he isn’t giving up that lead.
