Leaders of major artificial intelligence (AI) companies urged greater global vigilance Wednesday as they warned the United Nations Security Council about risks posed by increasingly powerful and autonomous systems.

“This moment calls for extreme care,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told an emergency meeting of the 15-member council.

Altman warned that increasingly capable systems could develop faster than governments and institutions can respond, while concentrating power in too few hands.

He urged governments and technology companies to work together on decisions shaping the technology’s future.

“If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone,” Altman said. “They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who addressed the council by video, said stronger safety standards would be needed as models become more powerful.

“We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe,” Amodei said.

“If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” he added.

Amodei also called for greater international cooperation, including common testing standards and safeguards against the use of advanced systems to develop biological weapons.

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue also addressed the council, arguing that open-source systems could play a role in defending against technology-enabled attacks.

The meeting came amid growing debate over whether development should slow as systems become more capable.

Altman said companies should avoid both “blind optimism” and excessive pessimism, arguing instead for a “middle path” that preserves innovation while strengthening safeguards.

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio similarly urged governments to turn growing concern into concrete action.

The calls for stronger oversight contrast with the position of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration has resisted international efforts to impose centralized governance on the sector and has argued against slowing development.

Altman and Amodei have increasingly called for international cooperation on safety standards as competition among major technology companies and countries accelerates.

The industry leaders told the Security Council that governments should play a greater role in ensuring that the development of increasingly capable systems remains accountable to the public.