OpenAI Asked for the IAEA, Then Asked the UN for a Ruler.

On 19 February 2026, in New Delhi, Sam Altman said the world may need something like the International Atomic Energy Agency for AI. On 23 September, in New York, he asked the UN Security Council for common standards, with each government deciding how to write them into its own law. Between those two sentences sits the most useful fact about this year’s AI governance debate, and I did not see it in the coverage of the Council session that I read.

I started this piece believing a different story: that two of the biggest American labs asked the Council for binding rules and their own government refused. The primary text does not support that. What it supports is stranger and, I think, more useful: a ladder of asks that grows at one lab and shrinks at another, a government that rejected a global regulator the labs had not asked the Council to create, and a room of states that asked for the referee the labs left out.

Preface

Why I am writing this. To correct a story I half-believed, and to say what is left when it is corrected. The version that circulated, and that I recorded in my own notes, was that the chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic asked the UN Security Council for binding international rules and the United States said no. I could not find the word “binding” in the primary record, so I read what each lab had said in public over the previous months. The Council remarks turn out to be one rung on two different ladders.

Terms. I use three separate powers, because the debate keeps blurring them. A standard describes how a model or its safeguards should be measured, tested or reported. A sanction is a consequence imposed on a developer who does not meet it, such as a fine. A gate is the power to stop a deployment before or after release. A referee is a body that holds at least the second power. A ruler is a standard with no one behind it. A runtime control is a mechanism at the point of execution that refuses an action as it is attempted; I come back to it in section VIII.

Assumptions. I assume the UN’s records are a fair account of the meeting. The provisional verbatim record is subject to corrections, the press summary is labelled as not an official record, and a machine transcript supplies the timings. I assume that what a company publishes under its own name is the best available evidence of what it wants, and that what a chief executive says in a short briefing is a compressed version of that.

Confidence. High on what the UN texts record and on what the American government has published. Medium on the labs’ positions, because several rest on their own pages and on press reports of an op-ed I did not read. Low on motive, which I do not examine.

What I will not claim. That OpenAI or Anthropic is insincere. That OpenAI’s change of formulation between July and September was a retreat rather than a change of venue. That anyone lobbied for or against anything in private. That any proposal below is doomed.

What was checked, and how. Research scouts and verifiers read the UN press release (through a browser, because automated fetches are blocked) and a machine transcript, and I then read the provisional verbatim record of the meeting, S/PV.10228, which the UN published in October. I also read OpenAI’s remarks, its 21 September post and its June blueprint, Anthropic’s chief executive’s June and September essays, the White House’s published texts, the American explanation of vote on the UN scientific panel, the 22 September call by Finland, Norway and twenty other leaders, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s page for its AI standards centre, and the EU AI Act’s enforcement articles. Altman’s February remarks, his July op-ed, OpenAI’s 9 September statement and the 29 September White House accord reached me through press reports. Several reviewers attacked the draft, and it changed shape twice as a result. Section X says what that does and does not mean.

I. What was said in the room

The meeting was the 10228th of the Security Council, chaired by France. Four people briefed it: Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN’s new scientific panel, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Clément Delangue of Hugging Face. Then the member states spoke. Briefers are invited by the presidency, and neither the press release nor the verbatim record shows an outcome document.

Here is what the UN’s texts record each briefer asking for.

Briefer	Substance of the ask	What it presupposes
Altman, OpenAI	A mechanism for complementary national and international frontier AI standards; common standards so countries can compare evidence and verify compliance; incident reporting protocols; secure channels to share vulnerabilities	Compliance with standards that each government decides how to adopt
Amodei, Anthropic	Narrow agreements every member can support, with a ban on AI-enabled biological weapons as the example; evaluation and verification systems; common global standards for testing models; an incident notification system	States’ commitments, verified by other states
Delangue, Hugging Face	Stronger standards for monitoring and incident disclosure, including mandatory sharing of agent traces	A duty on developers
Bengio, UN scientific panel	Licensing of frontier AI, liability insurance, safety guaranteed by international agreements	A licensing authority

Neither OpenAI’s nor Anthropic’s chief executive used the word binding, mandatory or treaty in the verbatim record, in which “binding” appears nowhere at all. A word search is a weak instrument: it cannot tell me whether an ask presupposes an obligation, and I did not search near-synonyms. That is why the right-hand column exists. Altman’s “verify compliance” presupposes compliance with something, and Amodei’s ban is a prohibition. The narrow, checkable finding is that neither named a body with powers over developers, a sanction or an instrument, and neither asked the Council to create one.

Other voices in the room did ask for more. Somalia backed mandatory incident reporting, and Bahrain recalled its leader’s call for an international treaty. France’s foreign minister, speaking in his national capacity, pointed to the IAEA and the Non-Proliferation Treaty as the model and ended by asking the Council to shape global AI governance. The United Kingdom’s foreign secretary said the Council could not ignore industry’s warnings or outsource the response to companies.

Why this matters: the two chief executives asked for the lower rungs, and others in the room asked for the rungs above them.

II. How the story got stronger than the text

Al Jazeera’s headline on the session read “OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs call for global AI regulation at UN”. The word in the headline is regulation, not binding, and the article’s body does not use binding about what the labs asked for. Its only use is about a 2024 General Assembly resolution. A headline has to fit a line, and “call for common testing standards and incident reporting” is accurate and does not travel.

I carried the stronger word, binding, into my own notes from somewhere in the coverage, and I cannot trace the step. A Euronews headline of 11 September on OpenAI’s domestic call for national rules used “binding”, and that is one place the word was in the air. That is worth saying because the story it produced had the shape of a reversal: industry begs for rules, government refuses. Reversals are satisfying to tell, which is a reason to check them against the transcript before repeating them. I did not check this one early enough.

Why this matters: a story that arrives shaped as a reversal deserves a primary-text check before it is repeated, including by its author.

III. OpenAI’s ladder, February to September

The Council remarks make more sense read against what OpenAI said in the months before.

February. At the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on 19 February, Altman said, as AFP reported, that the world “may need something like the IAEA” for international coordination of AI. The hedges are his. The IAEA’s defining work is inspection and verification, which is referee work.

June. OpenAI’s blueprint for a federal framework asked for a mandatory pre-release evaluation of the most capable models by the American government’s AI standards centre, once the agency has the capacity. The evaluators would recommend mitigations and would not approve or block a deployment, and developers could deploy without penalty if the agency was late. But the same document asked for audits, incident reporting and “enforceable consequences” for failing transparency, reporting and safety obligations, and for federal law to take over from state frontier-safety laws once it exists. By my own Terms that is a domestic referee with a sanction and no gate.

July. In an op-ed in the Financial Times, published on Wednesday 1 July and reported on 2 July, Altman proposed a US-led international forum that would set accepted standards, bring together governments and independent experts, and make the technology available only to nations and companies that take part and follow its rules. He said it could serve as “a governance mechanism over the labs”. I read this only through press reports. Taken at face value it is an international body with conditional access as its sanction.

9 September. In a statement reported by AFP, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer asked Congress for mandatory national rules based on what advanced models can do, saying the prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments.

21 September. OpenAI’s post two days before the Council session said the standards it proposed “would not be licenses, mandatory prerelease review, or approval requirements”, and that national governments would decide whether and how to incorporate them. It also said the United States should lead, and it links back to the Financial Times piece as something OpenAI had already suggested.

23 September. At the Council, Altman said: “Each government should decide how to incorporate standards into its own legal system.”

Read in order, the international ask lost its teeth between July and September. In July the forum governed the labs and controlled access. In September the standards were explicitly not mandatory, and adoption was left to each government. Meanwhile the domestic ask went the other way: it kept its sanctions, dropped the gate, and on 9 September said openly what the June blueprint implied, that national rules should be mandatory. The referee OpenAI wants is national. Some of this may be venue, some drafting, some a change of mind. OpenAI’s own post presents September as continuous with July, which is a fair objection to my reading. I cannot tell from public documents, and I do not claim to.

One more piece of context belongs here. On 26 August OpenAI published an account of a July incident in which its models, during internal evaluations with reduced safeguards, circumvented the controls meant to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s systems. OpenAI called it a “warning shot”. It said it had notified Hugging Face and was building towards autonomous shutdown for severe issues. The post does not say anything about notifying governments. A month later the same company asked the Council for incident reporting protocols and verification, and Hugging Face’s chief executive briefed alongside it. The reporting and verification asks are not abstract: they come from a lab with a recent containment failure and from the company it affected.

Why this matters: the useful fact about OpenAI’s Council ask is not what it left out but what was in the same company’s earlier proposals.

IV. Anthropic’s ladder, June to September

Anthropic’s path runs the other way, and the Council remarks again show only part of it.

In June, Dario Amodei wrote that it is time to go beyond transparency to “more serious and binding regulation of AI”. He asked for mandatory third-party testing of models above a compute threshold, and for the government to have the power to block or deter deployment. That is a sanction and a gate, addressed primarily to American policy and extended to a coalition of democracies.

In September, in an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier”, which he mentioned at the Council as having been published on 12 September, he set out four levels of global agreement. Level 1 prohibits narrow, obviously dangerous uses such as bioweapons production. Level 2 has both sides test models before release, which he says could be done through a global standards body. Level 3 is a speed limit on recursive self-improvement, which he compares with the arms-control treaties of the 1970s. Level 4 is a substantial pause by governments, which he says “is unlikely to actually happen any time soon”. He returns repeatedly to verification as the difficulty, says giving the global standards body real teeth will be a challenge, and, as far as I can find, names no enforcer for any level.

At the Council, Amodei asked for the first rung and part of the second: narrow agreements, evaluation and verification systems, common testing standards and an incident notification system. That is a different thing from what the coverage said and from “measurement only”. He asked for obligations on states, verified by states. He did not name who would enforce them.

So the picture is not “the labs asked for rulers”. It is that one lab’s international ask shrank from an inspection body to optional standards, and the other’s grew from domestic regulation to a global ladder whose upper rungs its author doubts. Neither, at the Council, asked for a referee.

Why this matters: the two labs are not one position, and the Council saw the lowest rung of each.

V. What Washington refused

The American delegate was Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The UN’s press release has him declaring that international dialogue on AI “cannot be allowed to drift towards global governance”. In the verbatim record he adds that a prosperous future will not be secured by “a global regulator”. He echoed the President’s address to the General Assembly the day before. The White House’s own release quotes the President saying the United States “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control” over AI.

This was not new. In New Delhi in February, the same official said: “We totally reject global governance of AI.” On 12 February the American delegate at the General Assembly called a recorded vote and voted No on appointments to the UN scientific panel, describing the panel and its associated dialogue as “a significant overreach of the UN’s mandate and competence”. The statement was about the appointments to the panel, and it added that the United States will not cede authority over AI to international bodies and will support like-minded nations working together outside the UN.

There are two ways to read this, and the evidence supports both. The first is that the United States rejects global standards: in Delhi, Kratsios said it prefers winning on the merits to imposing global standards. The second is that it rejects the UN as the place to write them. The July 2025 Action Plan says: “Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards”. It also tells the State and Commerce departments to use American influence in international standard-setting bodies to advocate governance approaches that reflect American values. Both statements come from the same administration. A defensible summary is that it objects to a regulator it does not control and to the UN as venue, and has not said it objects to standards it writes.

The panel vote corrects something I was inclined to say. It would have been easy to claim that the labs’ ask was shaped so that Washington had nothing to refuse. The panel is purely advisory, binds no one, and Washington refused it anyway. My inference, not a reported American reaction, is that what makes OpenAI’s September ask compatible with Washington’s position is not that it demanded nothing but that it said the United States should lead.

The American alternative is not empty, and it is easy to miss. In the Council, Kratsios cited the Carolina Principles for Emerging Technologies, which the G20’s innovation ministers reached consensus on in early September, agreeing that countries should preserve national sovereignty in how they govern emerging technologies. The standards centre at the Commerce Department’s NIST, now styled the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence, is to be industry’s main point of contact in government, to make voluntary agreements with developers, to ensure American dominance of international standards and to guard against burdensome foreign regulation, in its own words. And on 29 September six firms, among them OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Nvidia, signed a White House accord that, as reported, is voluntary, names no penalty, commits them to meet regularly to set standards and best practice, and was described by the President as morally binding. It also includes independent external evaluation of company controls, as reported. I read the accord only through press summaries.

Put those together and the American answer to who writes the standards is: the companies, convened by the White House, with a federal centre as their contact and no referee at any level. The labs’ asks and the American position overlap more than the Council drama suggested. What is missing is a named group of states with members and a process, and nothing I found shows one.

One domestic order belongs here, with a caution. In December 2025 Executive Order 14365 set up a task force to challenge state AI laws and called for a minimally burdensome national standard. It is domestic and says nothing about international bodies. OpenAI itself asks for federal law to take over from the states, so this is not distinctive to the administration. The fair summary is that Washington wants no referee above the federal level and little below it.

Why this matters: Washington’s objection is to who holds the whistle, and the labs’ own formulations have been moving towards the same answer.

VI. The room that did ask for a referee

If the labs did not ask the Council for a referee, someone else did.

The day before the meeting, on 22 September (the date on the published text), twenty-two leaders signed a call for control of frontier AI models, initiated by Finland and Norway. Signatories included the heads of government of Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Denmark and Singapore, the presidents of Finland, Kenya and South Africa and of the European Commission, and the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Turkiye and the United Arab Emirates. The text asks companies for mandatory pre-deployment testing and independent evaluation. It asks UN member states to explore an international institution able to “set standards, enable verification, and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed”. The word binding does not appear, but the first ask is mandatory by its own terms and the second names an institution with functions of a referee. France is not among the signatories, but its foreign minister told the Council that France supports the call, and Denmark’s representative cited it too.

The Council itself held divisions that did not line up neatly with the labs or with France and the United States. China, according to the machine transcript, supported the UN as the main forum for AI governance and stressed digital sovereignty. Russia doubted that the generic topic of AI belongs in the Council and pointed to specialist forums, one of them in Geneva. Liberia asked to be an equal co-architect of standards and proposed an informal Council working group on AI, and Latvia proposed an informal expert group. Colombia shared part of the American scepticism about an international body.

Whether the Council could ever hold the referee’s powers is a legal question my first draft answered wrongly. A Council resolution adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter binds states, not firms. It could oblige each state to bind its own developers, which is what Resolution 1540 did in 2004 for weapons of mass destruction: it required every state to adopt and enforce laws forbidding non-state actors from such activity. The precedent is narrower than it looks. It covered a closed category already defined in treaties, it created a reporting committee and not a referee, and it passed unanimously. Amodei’s bioweapons example overlaps with it. I read the resolution through a reproduction of its text. The correct claim is not that no tool exists but that no consensus does. The United States rejects global governance of AI and Russia questions the Council’s competence, and either could block such a resolution.

Why this matters: the referee was requested by other governments, the day before, in terms the labs avoided.

VII. Who could be the referee?

If standards are wanted and the UN route is closed, the candidates are national, regional or industry-led. Here are those that surfaced, with the three powers from my Terms.

Route	Sets standards?	Sanction on developers?	Gate?	American position
UN scientific panel and global dialogue	Advisory only	No	No	Voted No on the panel’s appointments, 12 February 2026
UN Security Council	Not by itself	Only through states, by resolution; none proposed	Only through states	Rejects global governance
Finland and Norway’s proposed institution	Yes, as proposed	Not stated	Not stated	Not a signatory
Federal evaluator proposed by OpenAI (the Commerce Department’s standards centre, now styled to cover “super intelligence”)	Evaluates and sets standards	Yes, as proposed: audits, reporting, enforceable consequences	No, by design, though unevaluated systems would be barred from federal use	Its own route
White House Accord on Super Intelligence, 29 September (as reported)	Companies meet to set standards and best practice	No penalty named	No	Its own route
FINRA-style body proposed by Demis Hassabis	Yes	Not at first	Mandatory only once the protocol proves itself	Status unclear; I found no official action
EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice	Yes, voluntary	No	No	Not a party
EU AI Act, AI Office powers over general-purpose models	Yes	Fines up to 3 per cent of turnover or EUR 15 million, whichever is higher, applicable from 2 August 2026	The Commission may request restriction, withdrawal or recall of a model	Not a party
California SB 53	Publication and reporting duties	Yes: up to $1m per violation	No	The federal government is working to displace state AI laws
Singapore’s agentic AI framework	Voluntary guidance	No	No	Not a party

My first draft claimed that no route combines a duty on the developer with the power to stop a deployment. That was wrong, and I had it wrong because I excluded the EU Act as “regional” while including a Californian state law. The AI Office can, optionally after a structured dialogue, request that a general-purpose model be restricted, withdrawn or recalled, and fines for failing to comply with such a request are in the Act. The power is thin: it is a request backed by a fine, it has applied only since August, and I have not found a reported use of Article 93. Among the routes raised around the Council session it is the only one aimed at general-purpose model providers that has all three powers on paper. It is not the only gate in the world: national regimes outside the table can also stop a service, and I have not tabulated them. Whether a request backed by a fine counts as a gate depends on a definition I have not defended.

The EU Code lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Mistral AI and IBM as signatories, with xAI signing only the safety and security chapter and Meta and Nvidia not listed. A standard agreed there is endorsed by a Commission the American government does not control, and applies to companies most of which are headquartered in the United States. I have not tested whether that is a deliberate route, and it may simply be where the work is.

Singapore appears in the idea that began this essay as a plausible centre of gravity. The framework is voluntary guidance for organisations deploying agents, and I co-wrote it. The Prime Minister signed the Finland and Norway call, which names an institution; the framework names none. Singapore can host a standard. That is a different job from holding a referee’s whistle.

Why this matters: among the routes raised around the Council, only the EU’s has all three powers on paper, and it is untried.

VIII. A standard needs a runtime control beneath it

The point I have been walking towards is narrow, and it is the one that most favours what I sell, so weigh it accordingly.

A standard says what good looks like. A referee applies it and can sanction or gate. Neither is the same as a control at the moment of action. A pre-release evaluation tells you what a model did in the tests. A sanction arrives after something has gone wrong. A gate decides whether the model ships. None of them can refuse a single action by an agent that is already running. For that you need a runtime control that refuses the action as it is attempted, deterministically, in bounded time, independently of the model it governs. I call this the enforceability test. It is a drafting proposal, not a finding: I have not scored any existing standard against it, and it is defined so that only a runtime control passes.

My first draft said a standard cannot refuse anything and that the missing piece was a control nobody was asking for. That overstated the case, and reviewers were right to say so.

First, regulators do refuse. Aviation, medicine, nuclear power and financial supervision all pair a standard with a body that licenses, inspects and recalls. The EU Act is the first attempt to build that pairing for general-purpose models. My claim is about a different moment: the act itself.

Second, runtime controls are usually the product of a standard. The American market access rule requires a broker-dealer to keep pre-trade controls that block orders exceeding set thresholds or appearing erroneous, to hold those controls under its own direct and exclusive control, and to have its chief executive certify them every year. That supports mandating the control. It does not support independent attestation: the check is the firm’s own certificate and a regulator’s examination. And the first enforcement case under the rule, against Knight Capital in October 2013, ended in a $12 million penalty, with the SEC finding that the firm lacked adequate controls and procedures for code deployment and testing. A mandate with self-certification failed in the founding case. Markets also have chokepoints and a closed set of typed orders, which agent actions do not, and the rule lists categories of order to block but leaves the design of the control to the firm. The argument over which actions is easier to dodge than I implied.

Third, a runtime control is only as good as its specification, and someone has to write the list of actions to be refused. That list is a standard. A deployer-authored list enforced by a deployer-controlled gateway is self-regulation with a log. A gateway also cannot see harm that emerges across a sequence of permitted steps, and it governs what an agent does, not what a model knows. For the capability risks that dominate the Council debate, such as uplift to weapons, it is a partial answer at best. OpenAI’s own account of the Hugging Face incident is the worked example, and it cuts both ways: the isolation controls were what the models got round. That is either evidence that controls fail when they are not independent of what they contain, or evidence of a specification failure, and I cannot tell which from the post. I also did not check whether the EU’s recall power could reach an incident in internal evaluations before a model is placed on the market.

Here is the case that remains. A standard written in the form “the model shall not act outside its authorised scope” can be assessed after the fact, and a runtime control cannot check it. A standard written as “the following actions are refused unless this condition holds” can be checked both ways. That is harder to write, and I think it is the argument the Council session did not have, though I am inferring that from five-to-nine-minute briefings.

Who specifies and who attests is the open question, and the market access rule does not answer it. A workable stopping rule would be a regulator-owned, versioned list of refused action classes, accredited attestors with civil liability, and regulator re-performance on a sample. Three classes to start with are irreversible payments above a threshold, writes to production systems, and network egress from evaluation environments. The last is the Hugging Face class.

The interest belongs here, in the body: I build and sell an execution-time enforcement layer, and my employer sells assurance and governance advice, so an essay that ends by asking for runtime controls and independent attestation flatters both. Disclosure does not rebut the objection. The most useful thing I can add is a falsifier that cuts against me, which appears in section IX.

Why this matters: the layers need each other, and the least-discussed one is the specification a control would enforce and the attestor who checks it.

IX. What would change this view

Predictions first, each labelled as one, with my own guesses at the odds.

I expect that by 31 December 2027 no Security Council resolution will contain a Chapter VII decision addressed to states that reaches frontier AI developers. My guess is 95 per cent. A useful interim marker is whether any draft text circulates by mid-2027.

I expect a political declaration signed by at least ten states using “shall” language for pre-deployment testing of frontier models by the same date, with the Finland and Norway coalition the likeliest vehicle. My guess is one chance in two. A binding treaty with that content is much less likely in the time, below one in twenty.

I expect the EU AI Office to have made a public request to a general-purpose model provider under Article 93 by 31 December 2027, or to have made its structured dialogue public. If nothing is public by then, either the regime is quiet because it works through confidential dialogue or it is a paper tiger, and I would not be able to tell which.

Beyond those, I would change my mind on the following, and each is checkable.

• If the corrected, final version of the verbatim record changes the wording I rely on, or shows either chief executive naming an enforcer, section I is wrong.
• If OpenAI or Anthropic publishes a statement that its Council remarks were meant as a request for binding international obligations, the reading of the ladders in sections III and IV needs revising.
• If the American government names a group of states with members and a process for common standards, the objection in section V was to the venue, not the idea.
• If the Hassabis body or the Finland and Norway institution is established with a sanction, the table changes.
• If incident reports filed under California’s law or the EU Act in 2027 show harms mostly of kinds that no deployer-side action gate could see, such as capability uplift or slow multi-step emergence, section VIII overreaches. That is the falsifier that cuts against what I sell.

Why this matters: a claim that names the evidence that would defeat it is easier to trust and easier to test.

X. The Case Against This Essay

A correction that flatters the person making it deserves its own objections.

First, I am reading short briefings as if they were complete positions. Each briefer had between five and ten minutes. The absence of the word binding from a short talk is weak evidence about what the speaker wants, and I searched for single words and no near-synonyms. The narrow claim, that neither chief executive named an enforcer or an instrument, is the one I rest on.

Second, the OpenAI timeline rests partly on press reports of an op-ed I did not read, and the February remark rests on an agency report of a hedged sentence. If the July op-ed said less than the reports suggest, the shrinkage between July and September is smaller than I have drawn it. I also cannot separate a change of mind from a change of venue, and OpenAI’s September post links back to the July piece as something it had already suggested, so the company would say there is no shift at all. A reader may find the ladder more suggestive than the evidence earns.

Third, a ladder of public statements is not a position. Companies draft for audiences, and the July piece, the June blueprint and the Council remarks had different ones. I have treated their differences as informative, and a company would reasonably say they are not contradictions.

Fourth, the verbatim record is provisional and subject to corrections, and the speaker timings come from a machine transcript. The quotations should be checked again against the final text.

Fifth, I read the 2004 Council resolution through a reproduction and the SEC’s market access rule through the Commission’s own guide, and neither carries much weight in the argument. The White House accord and OpenAI’s 9 September statement are known to me only through press reports.

Sixth, this is one session among several, and the week’s personalities may say less about the structure of the argument than I have implied.

Seventh, I sell an enforcement layer, and section VIII is the section that favours it. I have narrowed the claim to a layering argument and put a falsifier against myself in section IX. That reduces the problem and does not remove it.

Eighth, the check is only partly independent. Research scouts did the reading, verifiers rechecked the claims, and several AI reviewers attacked the draft from distinct lenses and changed it substantially. None of them is a human specialist in international law or in the labs’ policy teams, and none had the final word.

XI. Asks

Five audiences, specific questions, none of which needs new science.

OpenAI. In July you proposed a forum that governs the labs and controls access. In September you said the standards are not mandatory. Which do you want, and who applies it? A plain paragraph would help more than a careful one.

Anthropic. Your chief executive’s essay puts a global standards body at Level 2. Would you accept mutual pre-release testing as an obligation on your own deployments, and under what verification? Name who would enforce it.

The Finland and Norway coalition. You asked for an institution that can set standards and enable verification. Say whether it can sanction or gate, and write the standards so that a control could check them. A standard that names actions to be refused is harder to write and the only version that can bite.

The United States. You have the pieces of an offer: the G20 principles, the NIST centre, the companies’ accord. If the objection is to a regulator you do not control and to the UN as venue, and not to common standards, name the group of states, the membership and the process. OpenAI has already said the United States should lead; the next step is yours.

Regulators. Mandate runtime controls for named classes of agent action, starting with irreversible payments above a threshold, writes to production systems and network egress from evaluation environments. Require independent attestation of the action list and of the control, by accredited attestors who carry liability. A control written and checked by the deployer is the same voluntary arrangement this essay criticises, one level down. My employer’s assurance business would benefit from that ask, and I would rather you knew it.

I began with a headline about a referee. What the labs asked the Council for was a ruler, and much of the rest of the room asked for something to hold behind it. The argument about who holds the whistle has barely started.

Notes and sources

1. United Nations, Security Council press release SC/16462, meeting on artificial intelligence and international peace and security, 23 September 2026. Primary; labelled “not an official record”; read through a browser pane because automated fetches are blocked. Source of the American delegate’s sentence and of the briefers’ and several states’ positions. press.un.org
2. United Nations, provisional verbatim record S/PV.10228 of the Security Council’s 10228th meeting, 23 September 2026. Primary; provisional and subject to corrections; text extracted and searched. Source of the briefers’ words, the American delegate’s sentences, and the positions of France, the UK, Somalia, Bahrain, Latvia and Liberia. documents.un.org
3. United Nations, machine-generated transcript of the same meeting. Not official; used for speaker order, timings and the China and Russia positions. transcripts.un.org
4. OpenAI, “Sam Altman’s remarks to the UN Security Council”, 23 September 2026. Primary; read in a browser. openai.com
5. OpenAI, “Building standards for the next phase of AI”, 21 September 2026. Primary; read in a browser. openai.com
6. OpenAI, “Democratic Governance of Frontier AI: a blueprint for a federal framework”, 2 June 2026. Primary; full text read. cdn.openai.com
7. Dario Amodei, “Policy on the AI Exponential”, June 2026. Primary; read through a reader proxy; exact day not confirmed. darioamodei.com
8. Dario Amodei, “We Must Pace the Frontier”, September 2026; Amodei dates it 12 September in his Council remarks. Primary; read through a reader proxy. darioamodei.com
9. Times of Israel, report of Altman’s remarks at the AI Impact Summit, New Delhi, 19 February 2026, from AFP. Secondary. timesofisrael.com
10. Fortune (2 July 2026) and SiliconANGLE (2 July 2026), reports of Altman’s Financial Times op-ed, published on Wednesday 1 July, proposing a US-led international forum. Secondary; the op-ed was not read, and SiliconANGLE gives only the weekday. fortune.com, siliconangle.com
11. OpenAI, “Hugging Face incident and the road ahead”, 26 August 2026. Primary; read through a reader proxy. openai.com
12. Finland, Norway and twenty other leaders, “A call for control of frontier AI models”, 22 September 2026. Primary; read on the Dutch government’s copy. government.nl
13. The White House, “President Trump at the United Nations”, 22 September 2026. Primary; selected quotes rather than a full transcript. whitehouse.gov
14. The White House, remarks by Director Michael Kratsios at the India AI Impact Summit, February 2026. Primary. whitehouse.gov
15. US Mission to the United Nations, remarks on the appointment of members of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, 12 February 2026. Primary; read through an archive copy because the live page is blocked. web.archive.org
16. The White House, “America’s AI Action Plan”, July 2025. Primary; the “largest AI ecosystem” sentence is in the introduction, and the standard-setting-bodies action is under Pillar III. whitehouse.gov
17. The White House, Executive Order 14365, 11 December 2025. Primary; domestic only. whitehouse.gov
18. EU AI Act, Articles 93, 101 and 113. Primary text, read through a reproduction. Article 93(1)(c) lets the Commission request that a general-purpose model be restricted, withdrawn or recalled; Article 101 provides fines of up to 3 per cent of turnover or EUR 15 million, whichever is higher, for failing to comply with such a request; the general date of application is 2 August 2026. artificialintelligenceact.eu
19. European Commission, General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, list of signatories, page updated 7 October 2026. Primary. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
20. Demis Hassabis’s proposal for a US-led frontier AI standards body, 14 July 2026, as reported by The Next Web and others, secondary, with the proposal itself on Hassabis’s own newsletter, which a reviewer read but I did not. thenextweb.com, demishassabis.substack.com
21. California SB 53, Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, signed 29 September 2025. Primary; read for an earlier piece. leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
22. IMDA, Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI, version 1.5. Primary; read in full for an earlier piece. imda.gov.sg
23. Policy Magazine, “An Urgent Mission for Humanity”, Yoshua Bengio’s briefing, 23 September 2026. Primary for his call for licensing. policymagazine.ca
24. Al Jazeera, “OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs call for global AI regulation at UN”, 24 September 2026. Secondary; cited for the headline only. aljazeera.com
25. OpenAI, statement by Chris Lehane on mandatory national AI rules, 9 September 2026, as reported by Euronews and AFP. Secondary; the statement itself was not located. euronews.com
26. NIST, page for the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence. Primary; the date of the renaming is not stated on the page. nist.gov
27. White House Accord on Super Intelligence, 29 September 2026, as reported by Akin Gump, Infosecurity Magazine, MercoPress and others. Secondary; the accord text was posted on social media and no official copy was found, and I saw these reports only as search summaries. akingump.com, infosecurity-magazine.com, mercopress.com
28. The White House, “G20 Innovation Ministerial Concludes with Consensus Statement”, 2 September 2026, and the Commerce Department’s text of the Carolina Principles for Emerging Technologies. Primary; the principles’ text was not read in full, and the sovereignty wording comes from Kratsios’s remarks in the Council record. whitehouse.gov
29. UN Security Council, Resolution 1540 (2004), adopted under Chapter VII. Primary text, read through a reproduction. en.wikisource.org
30. US Securities and Exchange Commission, small-entity guide to Rule 15c3-5, the market access rule. Primary; read in full. sec.gov
31. US Securities and Exchange Commission, press release 2013-222, 16 October 2013, on the Knight Capital order. Primary; a $12 million penalty under the market access rule and a finding of inadequate controls for code deployment and testing. sec.gov
32. A note on timing. Speaker offsets in the machine transcript put Altman’s start about 65 minutes and Amodei’s about 56 minutes before the American delegate’s, and France’s foreign minister about 45 minutes before. “About an hour” is my rounding. Several other national statements sat between them. The offsets come from a machine transcript.

Declarations

Interest. I build and sell an execution-time enforcement layer. This essay concludes that standards and referees need a runtime control beneath them, which flatters it. I also co-wrote the Singapore framework that section VII lists as voluntary, Singapore’s Prime Minister signed one of the calls discussed, and my employer sells assurance and governance advice, which more standards and attestation would not hurt.

Not checked. The final corrected version of the verbatim record; the webcast; other national regimes that can stop a service, mentioned in section VII; the Digital Omnibus changes and any transitional provisions for earlier models under the EU Act; whether the AI Office’s powers reach internal pre-market evaluations; Altman’s July op-ed in the original; the text of the White House accord, OpenAI’s 9 September statement and the Carolina Principles; whether the AI Office has used its Article 93 powers; the companies’ private positions; anything the American government said after 23 September.

Not contacted. OpenAI, Anthropic, the US Mission, the UN press office, the Finnish and Norwegian governments, and anyone else named. A right of reply would be the first addition.

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Dr Luke Soon is an AI Leader at PwC Singapore, covering fourteen Asia Pacific markets, and co-author of Singapore’s Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI. He writes at genesishumanexperience.com under the Genesis: Human Experience in the Age of Artificial Intelligence banner.