On 23 September the UN Security Council held its first-ever session on AI, and the tableau was almost too perfect to be real. In the room, or beamed in, were the men who spent three years building the thing they now describe as possibly civilisation-ending: OpenAI’s Sam Altman in person, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei remotely, plus Hugging Face’s Clement Delangue, AI elder Yoshua Bengio, and, remarkably, representatives of Chinese labs DeepSeek and Moonshot. They came to ask the world’s governments to please, urgently, put some rules on the technology they cannot stop building. And from Washington, the President of the United States called the whole exercise a “globalist scheme.”
The split screen, in all its glory
Sit with the geometry of this. The people who built the bomb flew to New York to ask someone, anyone, to regulate the bomb, and the most powerful man on Earth used the occasion to imply they were dupes in a plot against America. Altman argued for shared international benchmarks and threat-sharing between countries. Trump has spent the month reframing AI oversight as a distraction from beating China, and now casts multilateral cooperation itself as a con. The builders want a referee. The head of state calls the referee a globalist. Everyone involved is, notionally, on the same side.
The Chinese presence is the part that should have been the headline. Getting DeepSeek and Moonshot to speak alongside OpenAI and Anthropic at the Security Council is a real diplomatic achievement, because losing control of a runaway model is one of the few things Washington and Beijing might genuinely both fear. That is a sliver of common ground you would want a serious adult to build on. Instead the serious adult in charge lobbed “globalist scheme” at it from the cheap seats and went back to posting.
What it means under the theatre
Here is the bind stripped of the pantomime: any meaningful limit on AI needs international agreement, the labs are now publicly pleading for exactly that, and the US government treats the plea as enemy propaganda. You cannot coordinate a global answer to a global technology when the most important country decides coordination is the threat. The UN session mattered, it was the first time this happened at that altitude with the actual builders and both superpowers present. Whether it leads anywhere rests less on Altman’s talking points and more on a White House that dismissed the entire thing as a hoax before the microphones were cold. Reassuring stuff, all round. (Sources: Fortune, Reuters, Business Standard, September 2026.)
Related: Trump’s rival idea: an ‘AI Force,’ like the Space Force but for this.