The Group Chat Where World Leaders Are Racing to Create AI Controls

Norway’s prime minister thumbed out a text message to an increasingly familiar contact on his phone—a fellow head of government he hoped would join a nascent plan of Western leaders to design a new framework to regulate artificial intelligence.

Jonas Gahr Støre said that within 10 minutes, Canada’s Mark Carney had texted back: “Of course. We’re in.”

Around the same time, Carney was discussing AI regulation with French President Emmanuel Macron on the French Atlantic archipelago of St. Pierre and Miquelon just off Newfoundland, as Macron’s government called on the United Nations Security Council to focus on AI and security ahead of Wednesday’s General Assembly. By Monday, Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb had published a two-page paper arguing that AI “must remain under human direction, oversight and control” and suggested creating a global supervisory regime.

A club of Western presidents and prime ministers is leading a new push for global controls on AI, echoing the nuclear arms treaties that took root during the first decades of the Atomic Era.

In conversations with The Wall Street Journal, leaders and their aides described a global system in which the world’s top AI innovator—the U.S.—is, in their view, reluctant to address the potential risks of a technology powering America’s stock gains and economic growth.

Carney has proposed a global “technology stability” body that would help set norms and constraints.

“There are leaders that step forward and say, ‘OK, where can we take responsibility, come together?’” said Støre, speaking from Ottawa, where he had spent the day in meetings with Carney. “I hear the American president saying, you know, ‘The only thing that matters is beating China in the competition.’”

In his address to the U.N. on Tuesday, President Trump said the U.S. would reject any “globalist scheme” to control AI.

The White House director of science and technology policy spoke at the U.N. on Wednesday and warned that international dialogue “cannot be allowed to drift towards global governance.”

“The frontier of intelligence is advancing rapidly,” Michael Kratsios said. “That is not a reason to pause its further development, or to constrain it with new global governance structures.”

Many analysts say any global standards body that doesn’t have the buy-in of the U.S. and Chinese governments would likely have a limited impact. So far, the countries pushing hardest for global guardrails are consumers rather than innovators and incubators of the world’s top AI companies, but several of America’s leading AI developers are also calling for global AI rules.

“If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in his Wednesday address to the U.N. “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 collective good in the face of a powerful new technology. We believe this must be one of those times.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered suggestions the U.N. Security Council could implement to cooperate on AI safety, such as an international ban on using AI to develop biological weapons and the creation of evaluation systems to track global AI progress.

“I believe that this is the most important global security issue facing the world today,” he said. “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. No leader, no company and no nation can manage this alone.”

Altman and Amodei used their U.N. speeches to call for the creation of a global body to set AI standards, which both companies have advocated for in recent months.

The comments echo a July proposal from Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind and previously its CEO, suggesting the U.S. government and tech industry should collaborate to create an AI standards body modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra.

Hassabis said AI developers could voluntarily submit models for evaluation up to 30 days before release, and that the U.S.-initiated effort would be a “strong starting point for creating shared international standards on frontier AI.”

The idea gained traction with some companies and some Trump administration officials, but stalled after Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk of SpaceX told the president they opposed the concept.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue also addressed the U.N. on Wednesday and called for greater transparency into private companies developing cutting-edge AI models. He pushed for the broad dissemination of open-source AI models, which can be downloaded freely and used at a low cost.

While Hugging Face was the victim of a widely-publicized AI-powered hack from models OpenAI was testing internally, Delangue said the AI industry shouldn’t stoke fear among the public.

“We strongly believe that fear-based narratives are not the way to make the right decisions about the future of such a foundational and empowering technology or bring the public along with us,” said Delangue.